Collective cognition in humans: groups outperform their best members in a sentence reconstruction task

Group-living is widespread among animals and one of the major advantages of group-living is the ability of groups to solve cognitive problems that exceed individual ability. Humans also make use of collective cognition and have simultaneously developed a highly complex language to exchange informati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2013-10, Vol.8 (10), p.e77943-e77943
Main Authors: Clément, Romain J G, Krause, Stefan, von Engelhardt, Nikolaus, Faria, Jolyon J, Krause, Jens, Kurvers, Ralf H J M
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Airports
Animal cognition
Animal sciences
Biology
Cognition
Cognition - physiology
Cognitive ability
Communication
consensus
Cooperative Behavior
crowd
Decision making
Evolution
Experiments
Female
Fisheries
Freshwater ecology
group-performance
Humans
individuals
Information retrieval
Language
Male
Prediction markets
Railway stations
Semantics
Sentences
size
Speech
Speech recognition
Studies
to-numbers problems
Voice recognition
wisdom
Young Adult
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Summary:Group-living is widespread among animals and one of the major advantages of group-living is the ability of groups to solve cognitive problems that exceed individual ability. Humans also make use of collective cognition and have simultaneously developed a highly complex language to exchange information. Here we investigated collective cognition of human groups regarding language use in a realistic situation. Individuals listened to a public announcement and had to reconstruct the sentence alone or in groups. This situation is often encountered by humans, for instance at train stations or airports. Using recent developments in machine speech recognition, we analysed how well individuals and groups reconstructed the sentences from a syntactic (i.e., the number of errors) and semantic (i.e., the quality of the retrieved information) perspective. We show that groups perform better both on a syntactic and semantic level than even their best members. Groups made fewer errors and were able to retrieve more information when reconstructing the sentences, outcompeting even their best group members. Our study takes collective cognition studies to the more complex level of language use in humans.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0077943