Some intellectual, cognitive and perceptual tasks can be solved collaboratively. It is common knowledge that group performance is better than that of each single individual due to exchange of information (and without going into issues of motivation).One widely known phenomenon is Wisdom of Crowds - when a group decision is much more accurate due to the averaging of individual biases. However, it is not the only possibility. Sometimes, a task can be divided into parts (and each participant works efficiently on his/ her own). Sometimes there are tasks too difficult to solve but easy to demonstrate that an answer is correct (and it suffices to have only one person in the group who answers correctly to make the group decision correct).What I am interested in is, how the group performance scales with the group size?(The measure of performance can be error rate, time needed to complete a certain task or the deviation from the right answer.)The question is motivated by one of my recent works, arXiv:1109.2044.EDIT (clarification):I am the most interested in low-level cognitive tasks (eg. perceptual or linguistic), esp. two-choice decisions (but also multiple choice, counting of blobs, solving a puzzle...) . However, other quantifiable measures for cognitive task (including, say, time to complete a certain programming project vs number of programmers) are of my interest as well.When it comes to the relation to my paper, I am curious if I miss an important reference or if my theoretical results can be supported (or undermined) by any existing experimental results (or even related in other context).
Performance of a group solving a cognitive task: How does it scale?
decision making;mathematical psychology;problem solving;collaboration;wisdom of crowds