“I know who, but not how many!” – Forgetting in Collaborative Settings

Abstract

Forgetting is a natural mechanism that keeps our memory from overloading. In the past it had a large influence on the design of Human-Computer Interaction. Yet, its main focus was on single user tasks and systems. Collaborative settings introduce the secondary task of coordination which has to share the already scarce capacity of the working memory with the knowledge of the primary task. Secondary task knowledge is critical to a team’s success but stored subconsciously, i.e., it can be easily lost due to interruption or interference. Therefore, a solid understanding of forgetting in collaborative settings is expected to have strong implications on the design of collaborative systems. This paper presents our first steps towards the goal applying an exploratory experiment observing primary and secondary task knowledge in a shared task. The results show how secondary task knowledge finds its way to stay alive.