Preprint · Oct 9, 2018
Learning with friends and strangers: does familiarity improve performance for younger and older adults on a collaborative referencing task?
By Crompton CJ, MacPherson SE
Collaborative learning with a familiar partner can reduce age-related differences in learning and memory. This study compares younger and older adults’ learning with familiar and unfamiliar partners to determine whether familiarity improves performance in a collaborative learning task. This study involved 24 younger adults aged 18-28 years and 24 older adults aged 60-80 years in familiar and unfamiliar pairs. Participants were asked to arrange abstract tangram shapes in a specific order on a grid over multiple trials. Each participant pair featured a director and a matcher; the directors’ tangram cards were arranged in a specific order on the grid and this order was communicated to the matcher. Each trial featured a different order of tangram cards, requiring participants to create, learn and apply efficient referential labels for each card. Older adults initially took longer to complete the task, using more words to correctly arrange the tangrams. Over multiple trials, a learning effect was observed in both groups, although older adults did not perform with similar efficiency to younger adults. Familiarity had no effect on performance, suggesting that the familiarity of a partner might not affect learning outcomes in a task that does not specifically rely on transactive memory.