The role of forget-cue salience in list-method directed forgetting

Research suggests that manipulating the wording of the forget cue in list-method directed forgetting affects the magnitude of directed forgetting both in younger children (Aslan, Staudigl, Samenieh, & Bauml, in press) and in older adults (Sahakyan, Delaney, & Goodmon, 2008). This occurs when the forget cue overemphasises the importance of forgetting in the current context. The present experiment investigated whether de-emphasising forgetting affected the magnitude of list-method directed forgetting in college adults. Some participants received overt forget cues that explicitly instructed them to forget earlier studied items, whereas others received covert forget cues that implied forgetting by emphasising selective remembering (e.g., “you will only need to remember some of the items”). Results indicated equivalent directed forgetting for both types of cues. However, regardless of the type of cue received, participants who reported using specific forgetting strategies in response to the forget cue showed directed forgetting, whereas those that reported doing nothing did not show any effects. The results underscore that successful directed forgetting requires engagement of controlled processes.     

Saving-enhanced performance: saving items after study boosts performance in subsequent cognitively demanding tasks

ABSTRACT

By saving and storing information, we use digital devices as our external memory stores, being able to offload and temporarily forget saved contents. Storm and Stone [2015. Saving-enhanced memory: The benefits of saving on the learning and remembering of new information. Psychological Science, 26(2), 182–188] showed that such memory offloading can be beneficial for subsequent memory performance. Saving already encoded items enhanced recall of items encoded after saving. In the present study, we did not only replicate saving-enhanced memory but found saving-enhanced performance for unrelated cognitively demanding tasks. Participants solved more modular arithmetic problems when they were able to offload a previously studied word list, compared to trials without the possibility to offload. Thus, saving of recently encoded items entailed a general benefit on subsequent cognitive performance, beyond encoding and retrieving word lists. We assume that offloading frees participants from the need to maintain offloaded items. Gained resources can then be used for subsequent tasks with high cognitive demands. In a nutshell, memory offloading can help to reduce the amount of information that has to be processed at a given time, efficiently delegating our limited cognitive resources to the most relevant tasks at hand while currently irrelevant information are safely stored outside our own memory.     

Escaping mental fixation: Incubation and inhibition in creative problem solving

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.     

The self‐choice effects on memory and individual differences in emotional intelligence

The present study examined the self‐choice effects on intentional memory and the relation between individual differences in emotional intelligence, and the size of the self‐choice effects. Word pairs were supplied to the participants in either a self‐choice or forced‐choice condition. In the self‐choice condition the participants were asked to choose one of the words that elicited more pleasant or more unpleasant episodes, and to remember the chosen word. In the forced‐choice condition one of the paired words was underlined to signify that it was the word to remember. For participants who chose a word that elicited more pleasant episodes, self‐choice effects were observed in pleasant‐pleasant and pleasant‐unpleasant word pairs. However, for participants who were asked to choose a word that elicited more unpleasant episodes, the effects were found in unpleasant‐unpleasant and pleasant‐unpleasant word pairs. The size of the self‐choice effects was determined by the level of emotional intelligence.     

“Scatter Analysis” Techniques Applied to Anxiety Neurotics from a Restricted Culturo-Educational Environment

Hearing-impaired children were individually administered a task in which possession of accumulating candy rewards was made contingent upon the child's decision to stop any further accumulation of the candy. Hearing-impaired children, who under instruction periodically made American Sign Language (ASL) statements about the goodness of the reward, waited significantly longer before terminating the waiting period than did hearing-impaired children instructed to sign statements about the act of waiting and somewhat longer than did hearing-impaired children instructed to sign a neutral statement. Since the pattern of delay was unlike that reported in earlier investigations when nonhandicapped children verbalized similar statements and since variation in mode of communication did not influence delay in nonhandicapped children in the present investigation, the results were interpreted in terms of differences in cognitive controlling mechanisms between nonhandicapped and hearing-impaired children.     

Directed Forgetting of Related Words: Evidence for the Inefficient Inhibition Hypothesis

Fifth-grade children and college students were asked to remember some words and to forget others in an item-cued-directed-forgetting task. Taxonomically related pairs of words and control pairs that were unrelated in meaning were used as stimuli. Children found it more difficult than did adults to ignore forget-cued words that followed asso-ciatively related words that were remember-cued. The results provide support for D. F. Bjorklund and K. K. Harnishfeger's (1990) inefficient inhibition hypothesis (i.e., that the efficiency of inhibitory mechanisms improves as children develop). The results also suggest that the inhibition is occurring primarily in the early stages of processing.     

Item-Cued Directed Forgetting of Related Words and Pictures in Children and Adults: Selective Rehearsal Versus Cognitive Inhibition

The main purpose of this study was to compare the relative importance of selective rehearsal and cognitive inhibition in accounting for developmental changes in the directed-forgetting paradigm developed by R. A. Bjork (1972). In two experiments, children in Grades 2 and 5 and college students were asked to remember some words or pictures and to forget others when items were categorically related. Their memory for both items and the associated remember or forget cues was then tested with recall and recognition. Fifth graders recognized more of the forget-cued words than college students did. The pattern of results suggested that age differences in rehearsal and source monitoring (i.e., remembering whether a word had been cued remember or forget) were better explanatory mechanisms for children's forgetting inefficiencies than retrieval inhibition was. The results are discussed in terms of a multiple process view of inhibition.     

Providing corrective feedback during retrieval practice does not increase retrieval-induced forgetting

Recalling a subset of studied materials can impair subsequent retrieval of related, nontested materials. In two experiments, we examined the influence of providing corrective feedback (no feedback, immediate feedback, delayed feedback) during retrieval practice on this retrieval-induced forgetting effect. Performance was assessed with category cued recall (e.g., recall all exemplars studied under Weather), category-and-stem cued recall (e.g., Weather–B___), and recognition. We report a dissociation between the effects of feedback on memory of the tested materials and the nontested materials. Whereas providing immediate or delayed feedback (compared to no feedback) improved recall and recognition of the tested items, it had no influence on retrieval-induced forgetting. These results are consistent with the inhibition account of retrieval-induced forgetting. From an applied perspective, this finding is encouraging for students and educators who use testing to foster learning.     

Rule Following,Error Theory and Eliminativism

Abstract

In this paper, I argue for three main claims. First, that there are two broad sorts of error theory about a particular region of thought and talk, eliminativist error theories and non-eliminativist error theories. Second, that an error theory about rule following can only be an eliminativist view of rule following, and therefore an eliminativist view of meaning and content on a par with Paul Churchland’s prima facie implausible eliminativism about the propositional attitudes. Third, that despite some superficial appearances to the contrary, non-eliminativist error theory does not provide a plausible vehicle for understanding the ‘sceptical solution’ to the sceptical paradox about rule-following developed in Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.     

Reason explanation and the second-person perspective

On a widely held view, the canonical way to make sense of intentional actions is to invoke the agent's ‘motivating reasons’, where the claim that X did A for some ‘motivating reason’ is taken to be neutral on whether X had a normative reason to do A. In this paper, I explore a challenge to this view, drawing on Anscombe's ‘second-personal’ approach to the nature of action explanation.