Cross-Cuing versus Self-Cuing- What Enhances Performance in a Brainstorming Task?

Group brainstorming and collaborative remembering are two research lines studying social influence on cognitive processes of knowledge retrieval. Both show that coacting others impair performance due to production blocking and/or retrieval strategy disruption. There is no evidence indicating performance enhancing effects of being cued. In two experiments, we investigated whether retrieval cues under conditions that avoid production blocking and retrieval strategy disruption might enhance brainstorming performance. Results of the first study show that using the last ideas out of one’s own retrieval clusters as self-cues improved individual idea generation. This result was replicated in the second study and contrasted with the effects of cross-cuing. Whereas participants in the cross-cuing condition did not produce significantly more ideas than those in a control condition without cuing, participants in the self-cuing condition outperformed those of both other conditions. These results are in line with a retrieval strategy interpretation: although cuing usually disrupts retrieval strategies and thus reduces performance, self-cuing can optimize retrieval strategies and thus enhance performance. Cross-cuing, however, can at most be ineffective.