Forgetting as a consequence and enabler of creative thinking.

Abstract

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.

Creativity and Memory

“…The specificity induction also produced very similar effects as observed in our previous studies (Madore et al, 2014; Madore & Schacter, 2014, 2015) on an imagination task, boosting the number of episodic but not semantic details that participants generated when they imagined possible future events. The parallel effects of the specificity induction on divergent thinking and imagination provide novel support for the idea that both draw importantly on episodic retrieval, consistent with previous findings and ideas about creative cognition (Addis et al, 2014; Benedek et al, 2014; Ellamil et al, 2012; Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Gilhooly et al, 2007; Smith, 1995; Smith & Ward, 2012), and to our knowledge the first evidence that an experimental manipulation that specifically increases episodic retrieval also increases a measure of creative thinking (for an example of related evidence, see Storm & Patel, 2014). …”

Explanation can cause Forgetting: Memory Dynamics in the Generation of New Arguments

“…This finding fits well with previous work on retrieval-induced forgetting and fan interference, which has shown that the selective strengthening of some informationwhether through retrieval practice, generation, or some other process-does not result in the impaired accessibility of other information when the two subsets are integrated or highly related (Anderson & McCulloch, 1999;Chan et al, 2006;Radvansky, 1999;Storm & Patel, 2014). In the present context, this finding suggests that the way in which people go about attempting to generate new arguments in support of a position can determine the mnemonic consequences of such attempts.…”

“…Indeed, effects similar to retrieval-induced forgetting have been observed in almost any situation in which someone must attempt to retrieve or generate some specific subset of information while not retrieving or generating other information (e.g., Bäuml, 2002;Johnson & Anderson, 2004;Healey, Campbell, Hasher, & Ossher, 2010;Levy, McVeigh, Marful, & Anderson, 2007;Storm, Angello, & Bjork, 2011;Storm, Bjork, Bjork, & Nestojko, 2006;Storm & Patel, 2014).…”

“…When items within categories are highly integrated or semantically similar (Anderson & Bell, 2001;Anderson & McCulloch, 1999;Goodmon & Anderson, 2011;Smith & Hunt, 2000), for example, or when participants are explicitly instructed to use nontarget information to help them generate target information (Ditta & Storm, 2016;Storm & Patel, 2014), retrieval and generation have been shown not to cause the forgetting of other information. In fact, when materials are designed to be particularly well integrated, the retrieval of some information can cause related nonretrieved information to become better recalled in the future than it would have been otherwise, a phenomenon referred to as retrieval-induced facilitation (Chan, 2009;2010, Chan, McDermott, & Roediger, 2006Cranney, McKinnin, Morris, & Watts, 2009).…”

“…Indeed, most research designs showing evidence of facilitation either used materials carefully designed to foster integration or explicitly instructed participants to use related information to help them retrieve or generate other information. In the work by Storm and Patel (2014) and Ditta and Storm (2016) using the Alternative Uses Task, it was only when participants were directly and explicitly instructed to use old ideas in their efforts to generate new ideas that generating new ideas failed to cause the forgetting of old ideas. These findings suggest that most participants may not use or refer back to information from existing arguments when generating new arguments and thus that existing arguments might be relatively more likely to suffer forgetting than benefit from facilitation.…”