09:00 - 10:30
Parallel sessions 7
09:00 - 10:30
Room: HSZ - N1
Chair/s:
Miles Tufft
Hutchins (1995) describes the scenario of crew members working together to navigate a ship at sea. They act as a well-coordinated team, with each crew member fulfilling a distinct role. The helmsperson steers the ship, the lookout scans for hazards, the compass operator checks bearings. By smoothly distributing task-relevant information, the team collectively solves complex problems that surpass the capacity of any single individual. What are the cognitive mechanisms that underpin such distributed behaviours? Our symposium aims to shed light on this question by drawing upon research from a range of cognitive domains. Across five talks, we discuss mechanisms that support individuals in distributing cognitive labour to solve complex tasks collectively. We cover tasks such as searching, remembering, problem-solving and decision-making. In doing so, we hope to demonstrate how our cognitive processes are attuned to the social world around us in ways that enable people to distribute, share, or offload cognitive load and thereby achieve more together than they could alone.
Submission 648
How T(W)O Divide a Search Task
SymposiumTalk-01
Presented by: Basil Wahn
Basil Wahn 1, Laura Schmitz 2
1 Technical University Berlin, Germany
2 University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany
When looking for a certain object or person, individuals often engage in collaborative visual search, i.e., they search together by coordinating their behavior. For instance, when parents are looking for their child on a busy playground, they might search collaboratively by dividing the search area. This type of labor division in collaborative visual search could be beneficial not only in daily life, but also in professional life (e.g., at airport security screening, lifeguarding, or diagnostic radiology). To better understand the mechanisms underlying this type of collaborative behavior, as well as its benefits and costs, researchers have studied visual search scenarios in the laboratory. The aim of this talk is to provide a brief overview of the results of these studies. Are individuals faster if they search together compared to alone? And if so, should they simply search in parallel, or will they benefit from agreeing on a specific labor division? How should they divide the search space, and how to communicate this division? Should a consensus be reached (target present or absent?) before ending the search? We address these and further key questions, focusing on the aspect of labor division. We hope that this talk can serve not only as a theoretical foundation for basic research but also as a practical inspiration for applied research and development.