Testing the Cue Dependence of Problem-Solving-Induced Forgetting

Abstract

Thinking and remembering can cause forgetting. In the context of remembering, retriev-ing 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—at-tempting 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 dur-ing 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.