The Department of Cognitive Science
cordially invites you
to the public defense of the PhD thesis
Interpersonal Information Integration
in Judgment Revision and Collective Judgment Formation
The Benefits of Distributed Access to Redundant and
Complementary Visual Information in a Shared Environment
by
Pavel Valeryevich Voinov
SUPERVISOR: Gunther Klaus Knoblich
SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Natalie Sebanz
Members of the Dissertation Committee:
Ágnes Melinda Kovács, Chair, CEU
Chris Frith, external examiner, UCL
Ilan Yaniv, external examiner, HUJ
Abstract
One intellectual problem where collaboration can be helpful is coming up with a
quantitative judgment under uncertainty. The common consensus among scholars and
researchers, though, is that people generally fail to fully realize the advantage of
having plural minds. The aim of the present work is to increase our understanding of
psychological and social mechanisms that allow interacting individuals to combine their
uncertain knowledge into a judgment, and the causes of collective benefit and collective
failure in this process.
The present work addresses collective judgment as an "information integration"
problem in analogy with the process of multi-sensory integration that takes place within
the brain (Ernst & Bülthoff, 2004), following the original approach suggested by
Bahrami et al. (2012a). It extends existing research on two lines. First, it addresses the
process of inter-individual information integration under conditions implying a different
degree of structural overlap in the individually available information. The second novel
aspect is the focus on non-verbal modes of interaction via a shared environment.
The thesis includes two empirical studies, each consisting of a series of behavioral
experiments that investigate how environment-mediated interactions can support the process
of inter-individual information integration under conditions of individual access to
redundant and complementary information. The two studies address two conceptually
different processes of inter-individual information integration: individual judgment
revision and joint judgment formation.
The first study investigates how indirect interactions via a shared environment can help
individuals to improve their perceptual judgments by observing another's judgments.
The main finding is that whether people can properly integrate observable information in
the environment produced by another individual depends on their uncertainty about their
own judgment. Crucially, when their own uncertainty is high, people do not discriminate
between information of high and low
quality in another's judgment. This leads to underperformance in the potentially most
beneficial conditions - the ones where people have access to complementary information.
The second study investigates how well pairs of participants can coordinate their joint
judgment by means of interactions via a shared environment. It addresses the interplay
between feedback on accuracy and verbal communication under conditions of simultaneous
access to complementary and redundant visual information. Under conditions of access to
redundant information, availability of feedback on accuracy turns out to be critical:
without it interactions do not lead to an improved judgment. Verbal communication does not
seem to play a crucial role, but it is helpful under conditions of access to complementary
information. Furthermore, in the latter situation, a reliable collective benefit from
interaction can be obtained in the absence of verbal communication, of feedback, or both.
The reported studies have three major implications. First, they suggest that in a
situation of collective judgment in a shared environment reliable collective benefits from
interaction can be obtained without verbal communication. Second, they point to a critical
role of a shared agreement on a judgment in this process. Third, they highlight the
significance of the factor of structural overlap in individually held information as an
important determinant of the amount of collective benefit that collaborators are likely to
obtain from social interaction.
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The defense will take place at room 101,
V. Budapest, Október 6 street 7, 1st floor
on Monday, May 29, at 10:00 a.m.
With kind regards,
Györgyné Finta (Réka)
Department Coordinator
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Central European University
Department of Cognitive Science
H-1051 Budapest
Oktober 6 utca 7.
tel: (36-1) 887-5138
fax: (36-1) 887-5010
http://www.ceu.edu
http://cognitivescience.ceu.edu