Scientific results show that two people have the ability to combine their sensory information
A team of EU-funded researchers from Denmark and the UK after discovering that two heads are indeed better but only when both partners are equally competent and could agree after discussing the problem soundly.
The work, published in the journal Science, is an outcome of the MINDBRIDGE ('Measuring consciousness - bridging the mind-brain gap') project, which received EUR 2.14 million under the ' New and emerging science and technology' (NEST) Activity of the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) to develop strategies and methodologies to bridge the gap between subjective experience and objective observation of neural phenomena.
In their study, Professor Chris Frith of the UK's Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London (UCL) and Professor Niels Bohr of Aarhus University in Denmark, along with their colleagues, investigated whether two people have the ability to combine their sensory information. Their results show that human beings have a knack for combining information from various sensory sources in order to make a decision, one that is a great deal more solid than one that comes from either source on its own.
In a first experiment, the researchers called on the study's participants, who worked in pairs, to detect a very weak signal delivered via computer screen. If the volunteers disagreed about when the signal occurred, then they conferred until they reached a joint decision. Based on the experiment's findings, joint decisions are much better than decisions made by the 'better-performing' person.
The team also carried out another two experiments which indicated that the stronger result depends on the partners' capacity to speak to one another. Just telling a person they're right is not good enough, the researchers said.
The fourth and final experiment found the opposite, however. The participants, again working in pairs, performed the same task but one of the volunteers did not know that they were secretly made 'incompetent' by being shown a noisy image whose signal was not easy to detect. In this particular case, two heads are not better than one.