The Incongruity-resolution Mechanism Of The Humor Effect Of Memory:Attention Maintenance And Elaboration

It's a common phenomenon for us that we could be more likely to remember the funny poem like “You will not find your books few until you refer to then;you will not realize your money is not enough until the end of the month” compared to a standard version like “You will not find your books few until you refer to then;you will not think the matter difficult you experience it.” Notably,humor not only relaxes people,but also facilitates remembering those things we have learned.Humor effect of memory refers to the superiority of the memory of humor materials compared to non-humorous materials.The universality and robustness of humor effect has attracted many scholars' interest and attention who have conducted a series of experiments with strict standard,and put forward to numerous theoretical explanations.The incongruity-resolution hypothesis is the most approval one which means the successful detection and resolution of the incongruity improves the performance of recall.And,incongruity results from a mismatch between features presented in working memory and those activated by an item.In addition,humor processing is divided into incongruity detection and incongruity resolution two stages.Now then it is important for us to clarify whether the two stages operate alone or combined.Previous researched confirmed that humorous materials can produce an advantage of memory and attention bias.Scholars have also tried to attribute humor effect to this attention bias,and they thought the humor effect deprives from the increased attentional resources and the longer attention duration for encoding humorous materials rather than non-humorous materials,so that the individual could be able to process these materials deeply and have a better memory performance.But the current problem is the lack of empirical researches to provide direct evidences about the role of attention maintenance and elaboration on the humor effect.The purpose of this study is to examine the mechanism of humor effect--the incongruity-resolution hypothesis directly.The success resolution of incongruity which is seemed as a resource of humor depends on attentional maintenance and elaboration.In order to fulfill this goal,we conduct two experiments: the first experiment uses the classic attentional bias paradigm--cue-target paradigm,controls the length of stimulus presented to directly measure the attentional alert andmaintenance,and combines with the memory performance to verify the role of attention maintenance.The results indicate individuals only maintain attention on the humorous materials compared to the incongruous and neutral materials;however,the recognition performance of humorous cartoons is not the best,this pattern shows that although humor has the characteristic of sustained attention,this can't completely explain the memory performance;that is to say,only attention duration increased is not sufficient to produce memory advantage,it also needs intentional processing.The hypothesis is confirmed partly that the humorous materials indeed sustain attention,but the results don't prove that humorous materials' attention bias is consistent with the memory processing.The results may due to cocurrent task distracts subjects' attention,and the time of presenting is too short so that subjects have not enough time to elaborate those materials.Accordingly,the second experiment utilizes the classic paradigm of humor effect and the special instructions directly to manipulate the elaborative processing and we can make sure the humorous and non-humorous materials received the same degree of attention.Participants perform elaboration or physical properties processing when non-humorous and humorous materials attain the same level of attention.The results indicate that the elaboration has an important role in promoting the humorous effect of memory.The internal processes of the incongruity-resolution that may be examined directly in this research contributed to addressing the mechanism of humor effect and the essential elements of the incongruity resolution stage.The introduction of cue-target paradigm to the memory experiments will provide a new perspective for this field.