A brighter side to memory illusions: False memories prime children’s and adults’ insight-based problem solving

Abstract

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Abstract Can false memories have a positive consequence on human cognition? In two experiments we investigated whether false memories could prime insight problem-solving tasks. Children and adults were asked to solve compound remote associate task (CRAT) problems, half of which had been primed by the presentation of Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists whose critical lure was also the solution to the problem. In Experiment 1 the results showed that regardless of age, when the critical lure was falsely recalled, CRAT problems were solved more often and significantly faster than problems that were not primed by a DRM list. When the critical lure was not falsely recalled, CRAT problem solution rates and times were no different than when there was no DRM priming. In Experiment 2, without an intervening recall test, children and adults still exhibited higher solution rates and faster solution times to CRATs that were primed than CRATs that were not primed. This latter result shows that priming occurred as a result of false memory generation at encoding and not at retrieval during the recall test. Together these findings demonstrate that when false memories are generated at encoding they can prime solutions to insight-based problems in both children and adults. Permanent repository link

Priming children’s and adults’ analogical problem solutions with true and false memories

“…Howe et al (2010a) demonstrated that adult participants solved more CRATs more quickly when primed with a false memory than when no prime was presented. This finding has been replicated and extended to include priming in children (Howe, Garner, Charlesworth & Knott, 2011).…”

“…We did, however, anticipate age and priming differences in speed of problem solving given what we know about differences in the structure of children's knowledge base (e.g., see Ceci et al, 2010;Howe, 2011b). That is, despite having the knowledge available to solve analogical problems, children's speed of processing during problem solving is thought to be slower relative to that of adults (see Howe et al, 2009Howe et al, , 2011. The question, then, was whether speed of processing could be affected by true and false memory primes in both children and adults.…”

“…Thus, it is clear that the impact of false memory priming on problem solving tasks is not just restricted to children's and adults' CRAT problems (Howe et al, 2010a(Howe et al, , 2011, but also extends to more complex reasoning tasks such as verbal analogical reasoning. That is, the current contribution is also important because false memory priming of CRAT solutions might be seen as simply representing the priming of distant word associations in a network of such associations.…”

“…Like the generation of spontaneous false memories in the DRM paradigm, solving CRAT problems is believed to involve a process of spreading activation, a link shared with the associative-activation account of false memories (Howe, Wimmer, Gagnon, & Plumpton, 2009;Howe et al, 2010aHowe et al, , 2011. If both CRAT problems and false memories utilize the same spreading activation mechanism, it seems as if CRAT problems provide an ideal platform from which to demonstrate priming effects with false memories (Howe et al, 2010a).…”

Undermining belief in false memories leads to less efficient problem-solving behaviour

“…Subsequent research typically showed the priming effect of believed false memories on CRAT problems (Howe, Garner, Charlesworth, & Knott, 2011;Howe, Wilkinson, Garner, & Ball, 2015); and found that the priming effect of false memories was similar to or even stronger than that observed for true memories (Howe, Threadgold, Norbury, Garner, & Ball, 2013;Howe, Wilkinson, Monaghan, Ball, & Garner, 2013). Based on Bernstein et al's work (2015), we predicted that if belief is more influential than recollection when it comes to impacting subsequent behaviors that ostensibly require non-conscious problem-solving processes, no priming effect would be found after beliefs for false memories are withdrawn.…”