The Effects Of False Memory To Junior School Students' Insight-based Problem Solving

Looking over the domestic and foreign researches on false memory,the study on its theoretical aspect is quite mature, so in recent years, more and more researchers gradually focus their analyses on the application of false memory ,especially the positive function of false memory .Study on the application False memory in memory etc cognitive field has made some progress, but in more higher cognitive tasks -- the problem solving ,it has just started.In this study,we used the DRM paradigm ,selected junior school students as subjects,explored whether false memory can also be used to prime higher order cognitive processes, namely, insight-based problem solving,and when and why it can be used to do this .In the first experiment ,Participants were asked to solve a number of compound remote associate task (RAT) 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. The results showed that when the critical lure: (a) was falsely recalled, RAT problems were solved more often and significantly faster than problems that were not primed by a DRM list and (b) was not falsely recalled, RAT problem solution rates and times were no different than when there was no DRM priming.In the second experiment, in order to find when and why false memory can be used to prime insight-based problem,we gave up the recall test prior to the problem solving task which was used in study one.Eventually,the result of the second experiment demonstrated that these outcomes were not a simple artifact of the inclusion of a recall test prior to the problem solving task,and these effects are due to priming from the activation of the critical lure (e.g., during list encoding) and not simply activation during the recall tasks itself.Due to these results of the two experiments,we can conclude that:false memories can also be used to prime insight-based problem solving;and these effects of this priming was not a simple artifact of the inclusion of a recall test prior to the problem solving task,and these effects are due to priming from the activation of the critical lure (e.g., during list encoding) and not simply activation during the recall tasks itself.The implications of these results are discussed with regard to the previous literature on priming and the adaptive function of false memories.