01. April 2020 : New publication on the scalability and limitations of group performance:

Wahn B, Kingstone A, Czeszumski A, Labusch M and König P (2020). Dyadic and triadic search: Benefits, costs, and predictors of group performance. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01915-0. Atten Percept Psychophys

In daily life, humans often perform visual tasks, such as solving puzzles or searching for a friend in a crowd. Performing these visual searches jointly with a partner can be beneficial. To date, it is unknown whether these group benefits scale up to triads or whether the cost of coordinating with others offsets any potential benefit for group sizes above two. To address this question, we compare participants’ performance in a visual search task that they perform either alone, in dyads, or in triads. We found that triads searched faster than dyads, suggesting that group benefits do scale up to triads. We also present a linear model to predict group benefits, which accounts for 70% of the variance. Overall, the present study demonstrates that group benefits scale up to larger group sizes, but the additional gains are attenuated by the increased costs associated with devising effective division of labor strategies.