The Effects of Manipulating Salience of Expertise and Membership Change on Transactive Memory

Abstract

Study 2 examined the effects of membership change on transactive memory. Four alternatives were tested: (1) when ONLY membership changes, there is no breakdown in transactive memory, (2) experts are not certain they have the same relative expertise in the new group, and therefore fail to focus their efforts within their areas of expertise after membership change, (3) members do not know who is the expert after membership change, and therefore duplicate each other's efforts at encoding, and (4) members do not know who the expert is and therefore do not acquiesce at retrieval. Participants completed seven trials of a memory task. In the NO CHANGE condition, all seven trials were with the same group. In the CHANGE condition, groups were disbanded and entirely new groups created after the fourth trial. Overall, CHANGE groups exhibited no breakdown in transactive memory, and some indicators suggest that membership change improved transactive memory. Transfer of strategy is implicated as the most likely reason for this finding.