Abstract
Prior research has demonstrated that subjects’ failure to spontaneously access acquisition information during a problem-solving task results in performance deficits that persist even after the subjects are informed of the relevance of acquisition information (Perfetto, Bransford, & Franks, 1983). The present experiments examined the hypothesis that these deficits are due to interference from previously generated inadequate solutions to the problems. The results indicated that subjects who generated responses on a first problem-solving trial were able to recall fewer acquisition answers on a second, explicit memory trial than were subjects who read the same Trial 1 responses as experimenter-provided material. This effect seems to be due, at least in part, to greater spontaneous noticing of the relevance of acquisition information by read than by generate subjects.
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This research was supported in part by Contract MDA-903-84-C-0218 from the US Army Research Institute to Jeffery Franks and John Bransford. We would like to thank Jane Kasserman, Larry Jacoby, Fergus Craik, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.
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Perfetto, G.A., Yearwood, A.A., Franks, J.J. et al. Effects of generation on memory access. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 25, 151–154 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330313
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330313