Collaboration in autobiographical memory and divergent thinking

Numerous studies have highlighted a connection between divergent and creative thinking with episodic memory. According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, individuals draw on past experiences and flexibly recombine retrieved memories to generate novel ideas. However, most research examining this link has focused on people thinking in isolation, despite the fact that autobiographical remembering and idea generation frequently occur in social contexts such as workplaces, classrooms, and everyday conversations. Therefore, the present study compared individual and collaborative performance in recalling autobiographical memories and generating uncommon uses under parallel conditions, using object cue words across tasks. Our findings partially support the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis: the two tasks were strongly correlated, yielded similar overall performance across group conditions, and both showed a significant decline in the number and variety of responses over time, although this decrease was more pronounced for memory retrieval. Contrary to previous work documenting detrimental effects of collaboration, our results indicate that collaborative and individual performance in divergent thinking and autobiographical memory are largely equivalent, while collaboration increases participants’ enjoyment of this task. Future research should clarify the conditions under which group settings optimize both episodic retrieval and creative thinking.