Earlier research by the author brought about findings suggesting that people in a special way process words related to demands of a problem they previously solved, even when they do not consciously notice this relationship. The findings concerned interference in the task in which the words appeared, a shift in affective responses to them that depended on sex of the participants, and impaired memory of the words. The aim of this study was to replicate these effects and to find out whether they are related to working memory (WM) span of the participants, taken as a measure of the individual’s ability to control attention. Participants in the experimental group solved a divergent problem, then performed an ostensibly unrelated speeded affective classification task concerning each of a series of nouns, and then performed an unexpected cued recall task for the nouns. Afterwards, a task measuring WM span was administered. In the control group there was no problem-solving phase. Response latencies for words immediately following problem-related words in the classification task were longer in the experimental than in the control group, but there was no relationship between this effect and WM span. Solving the problem, in interaction with sex of the participants and, independently, with their WM span, influenced affective responses to problem-related words. Recall of these words, however, was not impaired in the experimental group.
Earlier research by the author revealed that material encoded incidentally in a speeded affective classification task and related to the demands of a divergent problem tends to be recalled worse in participants who solved the problem prior to encoding than in participants in the control, no-problem condition. The aim of the present experiment was to replicate this effect with a new, size-comparison orienting task, and to test for possible mechanisms of impaired recall. Participants either solved a problem before the orienting task or not, and classified each item in this task either once or three times. There was a reliable effect of impaired recall of problem-related items in the repetition condition, but not in the no-repetition condition. Solving the problem did not influence repetition priming for these items. These results support an account that attributes the impaired recall to inhibitory processes at learning and speak against a proactive interference explanation. However, they can be also accommodated by an account that refers to inefficient context cues and competitor interference at retrieval.
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