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Five experiments examined the influence of exposure to fixating information on metacognitive judgements of insight in creative problem solving. Participants were briefly presented with a series of Remote Associates Test problems and were asked to predict the likelihood of solving the problems at a later time. Before making predictions, however, participants were exposed to cue-response pairs designed to induce fixation. Although participants solved fewer problems in this fixation condition than in a baseline condition, when it came to making predictions, participants were just as confident in their ability to solve problems in the fixation condition as they were in the baseline condition. In fact, in some experiments, participants were significantly more confident in the fixation condition than in the baseline condition. These results suggest that people may not take into account the fixating effects of nontarget information when making judgements about their ability to solve problems.

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.

Research on retrieval-induced forgetting has shown that retrieval can cause the forgetting of related or competing items in memory (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). In the present research, we examined whether an analogous phenomenon occurs in the context of creative problem solving. Using the Remote Associates Test (RAT; Mednick, 1962), we found that attempting to generate a novel common associate to 3 cue words caused the forgetting of other strong associates related to those cue words. This problem-solving-induced forgetting effect occurred even when participants failed to generate a viable solution, increased in magnitude when participants spent additional time problem solving, and was positively correlated with problem-solving success on a separate set of RAT problems. These results implicate a role for forgetting in overcoming fixation in creative problem solving., ((c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved.)

Technological advances have given us tools--Google, in particular--that can both augment and free up our cognitive resources. Research has demonstrated, however, that some cognitive costs may arise from our reliance on such external memories. We examined whether pretesting--asking participants to solve a problem before consulting Google for needed information--can enhance participants' subsequent recall for the searched-for content as well as for relevant information previously studied. Two groups of participants, one with no programming knowledge and one with some programming knowledge, learned several fundamental programming concepts in the context of a problem-solving task. On a later multiple-choice test with transfer questions, participants who attempted the task before consulting Google for help out-performed participants who were allowed to search Google right away. The benefit of attempting to solve the problem before googling appeared larger with some degree of programming experience, consistent with the notion that some prior knowledge can help learners integrate new information in ways that benefit its learning as well as that of previously studied related information.

Schacter's (2001) work on "The Seven Sins of Memory" conceptualized and communicated many of the failures of memory and their critical role in cognition. At the heart of the framework is the idea that memory often fails not because it is dysfunctional or maladaptive, but because it prioritizes flexibility and the ability to think and behave adaptively over the ability to retain and remember veraciously. This article adapts the 7 sins framework to a new domain--that of creative cognition. Each of the 7 sins are discussed in relation to how they might play a role in allowing people to generate new ideas, solve problems, and overcome the various barriers that hinder creative thought. Expanding upon the creative cognition approach, it is argued that memory and creativity are intrinsically interconnected and that one's ability to think and behave creatively relies in part on the ability to forget and misremember.

Four experiments examined the interplay of memory and creative cognition, showing that attempting to think of new uses for an object can cause the forgetting of old uses. Specifically, using an adapted version of the Alternative Uses Task (Guilford, 1957), participants studied several uses for a variety of common household objects before attempting to generate new uses for half of those objects. As revealed by performance on a final cued-recall task, attempting to generate new uses caused participants to forget the studied uses. This thinking-induced forgetting effect was observed regardless of whether participants attempted to generate unusual uses or common uses, but failed to emerge when participants used the studied uses as hints to guide their generation of new uses. Additionally, the forgetting effect correlated with individual differences in creativity such that participants who exhibited more forgetting generated more creative uses than participants who exhibited less forgetting. These findings indicate that thinking can cause forgetting and that such forgetting may contribute to the ability to think creatively.

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-solving-induced 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.

Mind wandering has been argued to both impair and facilitate performance on complex cognitive tasks such as those encountered in the classroom. On the one hand, mind wandering may prevent students from fully encoding and remembering to-be-learned information. On the other hand, mind wandering may allow learners to consider to-be-learned information in the light of other contexts and situations. The current study examined the relationship between individual differences in mind wandering while reading and performance on an analogical reasoning task that required participants to recognize similarities between an unsolved problem and information presented in a set of passages. Across two studies, we found no evidence that participants who mind wandered more performed better on the reasoning task than participants who mind wandered less. In fact, the opposite pattern was observed, suggesting that the propensity to mind wander may put individuals at a disadvantage when it comes to analogical reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology is changing the world, and in so doing, it may be profoundly reshaping human cognition. Many cognitive goals are accomplished in entirely different ways than they were in the past - incorporating the internet, smartphones, and other digital devices and online platforms - thereby potentially modifying basic cognitive processes and outcomes. [Extracted from the article]