Symposium on Interactive Cognition

Divergent thinking (DT) is the ability to generate multiple, varied, and novel ideas in response to an open-ended problem. DT has been shown to improve with practice. The goal of the current study was to determine whether peer-assisted learning (PAL) is superior to individual learning (IL) in improving DT. Sixty-six participants were randomly assigned to complete a modified version of the Divergent Association Task (Olson et al., 2021) either alone (IL condition) or with a partner in a dyad (PAL condition). Over 10 rounds, participants in the IL condition generated multiple words as they compiled lists of words that were as unrelated to each other as possible, whereas PAL participants generated half the words with the other half supplied by their partners. Overall, IL participants achieved higher DT scores than PAL participants and both groups improved their scores with practice; however, PAL participants improved at a faster rate than IL participants, starting lower but reaching the IL level and slightly exceeding it in the last three rounds. A behavioral measure of trust was used to explain PAL’s initial disadvantage and its faster learning rate. Initially, PAL participants selected self-generated words much more frequently than peer-generated words, even though the peer-generated words were more divergent and would have improved their scores. However, with practice, their trust increased allowing them to benefit from more divergent peer-generated words. This study contributes to advancing the science of interactive cognition by demonstrating that cognitive and interpersonal processes are dynamically coupled.

This is an in-person presentation on July 20, 2026 (11:00 ~ 11:20 EDT).