The Social Route to Abstraction: Interaction and Diversity Enhance Performance and Transfer in a Rule‐Based Categorization Task

Abstract

Capacities for abstract thinking and problem‐solving are central to human cognition. Processes of abstraction allow the transfer of experiences and knowledge between contexts helping us make informed decisions in new or changing contexts. While we are often inclined to relate such reasoning capacities to individual minds and brains, they may in fact be contingent on human‐specific modes of collaboration, dialogue, and shared attention. In an experimental study, we test the hypothesis that social interaction enhances cognitive processes of rule‐induction, which in turn improves problem‐solving performance. Through three sessions of increasing complexity, individuals and groups were presented with a problem‐solving task requiring them to categorize a set of visual stimuli. To assess the character of participants’ problem representations, after each training session, they were presented with a transfer task involving stimuli that differed in appearance, but shared relations among features with the training set. Besides, we compared participants’ categorization behaviors to simulated agents relying on exemplar learning. We found that groups performed superior to individuals and agents in the training sessions and were more likely to correctly generalize their observations in the transfer phase, especially in the high complexity session, suggesting that groups more effectively induced underlying categorization rules from the stimuli than individuals and agents. Crucially, variation in performance among groups was predicted by semantic diversity in members’ dialogical contributions, suggesting a link between social interaction, cognitive diversity, and abstraction.

Language specific constraints on conversation: Evidence from Danish and Norwegian

“…Backchannels and repairs have been conceptually linked to the ability to navigate and jointly solve complex conversational tasks (Bangerter & Clark, 2003;Clark & Brennan, 1991;Mills, Groningen, & Redeker, 2017). Further, linguistic entrainment has been more directly associated with performance, both conceptually and experimentally, albeit the results are not fully consistent across studies, perhaps due to methodological differences Dideriksen et al, 2023;Duran et al, 2019;Fusaroli, Bjørndahl, Roepstorff, & Tylén, 2016;Healey et al, 2014;Reitter & Moore, 2014;Tylén, Fusaroli, Østergaard, Smith, & Arnoldi, 2023). In other words, when there is a need to communicate more precisely (task-oriented conversations), interlocutors might, for instance, repeat longer stretches of each other's utterances (lexical entrainment level).…”

“…Afterward, they were asked to complete the two collaborative tasks. First, they played the Alien Game (Tylén et al, 2023), a joint decision task, where two participants have to jointly make decisions about how to categorize items (in this case, a series of aliens) presented on a shared screen. Through repeated trials, an alien would appear on the screen for 3 s after which it would disappear.…”

Language‐Specific Constraints on Conversation: Evidence from Danish and Norwegian

“…Afterward, they were asked to complete the two collaborative tasks. First, they played the Alien Game (Tylén et al., 2023), a joint decision task, where two participants have to jointly make decisions about how to categorize items (in this case, a series of aliens) presented on a shared screen. Through repeated trials, an alien would appear on the screen for 3 s after which it would disappear.…”

“…Backchannels and repairs have been conceptually linked to the ability to navigate and jointly solve complex conversational tasks (Bangerter & Clark, 2003; Clark & Brennan, 1991; Mills, Groningen, & Redeker, 2017). Further, linguistic entrainment has been more directly associated with performance, both conceptually and experimentally, albeit the results are not fully consistent across studies, perhaps due to methodological differences (Dale et al., 2013; Dideriksen et al., 2023; Duran et al., 2019; Fusaroli et al., 2012; Fusaroli, Bjørndahl, Roepstorff, & Tylén, 2016; Healey et al., 2014; Pickering & Garrod, 2004; Reitter & Moore, 2014; Tylén, Fusaroli, Østergaard, Smith, & Arnoldi, 2023). In other words, when there is a need to communicate more precisely (task‐oriented conversations), interlocutors might, for instance, repeat longer stretches of each other's utterances (lexical entrainment level).…”

An ensemble method utilising multiple thinking styles that boosts the wisdom of the inner crowd effect

“…How can people make accurate estimates for these types of questions? One promising approach is that of 'the wisdom of the crowds' [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] . In other words, the average estimate of a crowd of individuals yields surprisingly accurate estimates.…”