Abstract:

PURPOSE: Cooperation and competition usually induce different mental construal processes, leading to assimilation and contrast effects. The present study investigated whether the state and trait cooperation/competition modulate the representations in visual working memory (VWM).
METHODS: In Expriment1, after an online cooperative/competitive priming task, participants completed a working memory task individually to remember several colors and then recall one of the item by reproducing it on a continuous color wheel. In Experiment 2, we recruited participants who were cooperation/competition oriented to take part in the visual WM task identical to that in Experiment1.
RESULTS: In Expriment1, results showed no significant difference on WM capacity and resolution between the two priming conditions. In Experiment 2, we found that cooperation-oriented participants showed higher VWM resolution than those competition-oriented, but there was no significant difference on the VWM capacity.
CONCLUSIONS: Taken together, these results suggest that cooperation personality selectively boosts VWM resolution. In addition, our results found no assimilation and contrast effects, which are usually revealed in the previous studies about cooperation and competition, implying the mechanism that competition and cooperation modulate mental representations is likely to be more complicated than merely assimilating or contrasting.

Key words: Visual working memory, Cooperation, Competition