Recent research has found that individuals can selectively forget a subset of items through directed forgetting. The goal of the present study was to replicate this selective directed forgetting effect and elucidate its underlying mechanisms. Unfortunately, results from four experiments failed to find any evidence of selective directed forgetting. Participants failed to forget any items when instructed to forget a subset of items from a first list before learning a second list. Participants were only successful in forgetting items from the first list when they were instructed to forget all items from the first list before learning the second list.
The inhibition underlying retrieval-induced forgetting has been argued to play a crucial role in the ability to overcome interference in memory and cognition. Supporting this conjecture, recent research has found that participants who exhibit greater levels of retrieval-induced forgetting are better at overcoming fixation on the Remote Associates Test (RAT) than are participants who exhibit reduced levels of retrieval-induced forgetting. If the ability to inhibit inappropriate responses improves the ability to solve fixated RAT problems, then reducing the fixation caused by inappropriate responses should reduce the correlation between retrieval-induced forgetting and problem solving. We tested this hypothesis by inserting an incubation period between two 30-second problem-solving attempts: half of the participants were given an incubation period (distributed condition), half were not (continuous condition). In the continuous condition retrieval-induced forgetting correlated positively with problem-solving performance during both the initial and final 30 seconds of problem solving. In the distributed condition retrieval-induced forgetting only correlated with problem-solving performance during the first 30 seconds of problem solving. This finding suggests that incubation reduces the need for inhibition by reducing the extent to which problem solvers suffer fixation.
Abstract:Thinking and remembering can cause forgetting. In the context of remembering, retrieving one item can cause the forgetting of other items (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). A similar phenomenon has been observed in the context of creative problem solving-attempting to generate a target associate in the Remote Associates Test (RAT) can cause the forgetting of inappropriate associates (Storm, Angello, & Bjork, 2011). Experiment 1 examined whether this problem-solving-induced forgetting is cue dependent or cue independent by manipulating the cues used at final test. Whereas some participants were tested on the inappropriate associates using the same cues that were used during problem solving, other participants were tested using new, or independent, cues. Problem-solving-induced forgetting was observed in the same-cue condition, but not in the new-cue condition. Experiment 2 replicated the overall absence of problem-solvinginduced forgetting in the new-cue condition and found that individual differences in cue-independent forgetting did not predict problem-solving performance on a separate set of RAT problems.
The tendency to conform to prior examples can be viewed as a form of mental fixation that has negative consequences and limits the scope and quality of designs. Two experiments using the Smith, S. M., Ward, T. B., & Schumacher, J. S. [(1993) Memory & Cognition, 21, 837‐845] toy invention task were conducted to determine whether participants who viewed example toys would subsequently generate toys rated as less novel compared to a control group viewing no examples. Although participants who viewed examples tended to incorporate the example features into their own ideas, the novelty of their ideas was rated as higher than those of the control group. This effect occurred both with no specific instruction regarding the examples (Experiment 1), as well as when specifically instructed to be different from the examples (Experiment 2). These results indicate that examples do not always have a negative impact on creativity, and suggest they may sometimes help lead to more unusual ideas.
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