| dc.description.abstract | 8 experiments were conducted to examine forgetting fixation in creative incubation.
First, the strength and nature of fixation was studied. Experiments 1 and 2 found that
both repetition and context reinstatement of the encoding context for misleading red
herrings affect creative problem solving negatively, more repetition and the
reinstatement of the study context for the misleading solutions made it more difficult to
solve Remote Associates Test problems. Exposure to multiple different red herrings also
impaired problem solving. In Experiments 3 and 4, the number of red herrings was
manipulated in a Word Fragment Completion task. The more similar, but incorrect,
answers participants were exposed to, the less they were likely to solve subsequent word
fragment problems. In the second set of experiments, factors that might eliminate
fixation during an incubation period were studied. Experiments 5 and 6 showed that both
additional incubation time and the change of the fixating context might assist in
alleviating fixation in a creative problem solving task. The last two experiments looked
at adaptive forgetting processes in eliminating fixation. Experiment 7 established a new
method to study problem solving induced forgetting using the guess method and
Experiment 8 showed that neural correlates for problem solving induced forgetting are
similar to those indicated in the memory process called retrieval induced forgetting. The
results inform us about ways to eliminate fixation in order to assist creative problem
solving, and provide additional support for the ties between cognitive processes of
memory and creativity. | en |
