The Effect Of Working Memory Breadth And Memory Load On Unconscious Thinking And Decision-making

The conventional view is that the thought as a senior human cognitive activity,belong to the category of consciousness.But recently studies show that thought can not only be carried out under the condition of the unconscious,but also has no intention of solving certain complicated problems.The result of unconscious thought is also better than conscious thought.The study of unconscious thought breaks through the traditional concept of "good result" has become one of the hot issues in the field of social cognitive research.According to the theory of unconscious thought(Dijksterhuis&Norgren,2006),while engaged in distracted operations for a period of time,unconscious thought plays an important role in information processing.Previous studies have pointed out that in the case of complex decision-making,the use of unconscious thought can help individuals make better decisions in comparison to conscious thought,that is,individuals who use unconscious thought can better distinguish between the best decisions and the difference between the worst decisions,but this unconscious thought decision-making advantage can not be uniformly verified,which means that there may be other factors behind the impact on this phenomenon.This study follows the experimental paradigm of unconscious thought theory.Under the premise of verifying the effect of unconscious thought decision-making,it explores the impact of individual's working memory breadth and memory load on unconscious thought decisions.It mainly includes the contents of two experiments:The first part is experiment 1,using 2(working memory breadth:high,low)x 2(thought situation:conscious thought,unconscious thought)completely random design,experimental materials for the four hypothetical mobile phones have 12 attributes for each cell phone,a total of 48 messages.A total of 85 college students were randomly selected for experiments to obtain 78 valid data.By SPSS17.0 analysis of variance,the main effect of working memory on the thought situation was F(1.73)=16.52,p<0.001,indicating that the high decision-making quality of the work-memory breadth group was better than that of the low working memory breadth.There was a significant difference in the interaction of thought conditionsxwork memory breadth F(1,73)=4.23,p<0.05.The second part is experiment 2,using 2(working memory breadth:high,low)x 2(thought situation:conscious thought,unconscious thought)× 2(memory load:high,low)completely random design,experimental materials and experiment 1 In the same way,a total of 130 participants took part in the experiment,and 115 valid subjects were tested.Analysis of variance showed that the main effects of work memory breadth and memory load were F(1,107)=9.12,p<0.05;F(1,107)=25.58,p<0.05;Thought situation×Working memory breadthxWork memory load had no interaction effect F(1,107)=0.20,p>0.05;There was interaction effect between thought situationxworking memory load F(1,107)=4.42,p<0.05.Finally get the following conclusions:(1)When solving some complicated problems,the unconscious thought decision results are better than the conscious thought decision results,but no significant differences are shown,and there are other influencing factors in the unconscious thinking effect.(2)Individuals with high working memory breadth do not show different decision preferences because of different thought contexts.Individuals with low working memory breadth vary with different thought situations,manifested as individuals in the context of unconscious thought.The quality of decision-making is obviously better than that of conscious thought;(3)Memory load also has a significant effect on the unconscious thought effect.It shows that under high memory load,there are differences in the decision quality under different thinking situations.The decision quality of unconscious thought is significantly better than that of conscious thinking,but in conscious thought conditions.Next,there are also significant differences in different memory loads,that is,the decision quality of low memory load is better than that of high memory load.Through two experiments to test the impact of cognitive resources on unconscious thought decisions,whether it can successfully demonstrate the decision advantage of unconscious thought,the key lies in the cognitive resources owned by individuals.