A Distributed Representation Approach to Group Problem Solving

This article develops a theoretical framework of distributed representations to explore the representational properties in group problem solving. The basic principle of distributed representations is that the representational system of a group problem solving task is distributed across the representations of indiwhich together represent the abstract structure of the task. The framework was used to analyze the distributed representation of the Waitress and Orange task. From this analysis, an experiment was designed to examine group problem solving behaviors under different distributed representations. The experiment shows that (1) different distributed representations across two individuals produced dramatically different group problem solving behaviors even if they had the same structure, and (2) two minds could be better than, not different from, or even worse than one mind, depending on how representations were distributed across the two minds. These results further support the inte...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1998
• Where: JASIS
• Authors: Jiajie Zhang
• Keywords: Cognitive Properties, Distributed Representations, Group Problem, JASIS 1998