Inhibitory control during selective retrieval may hinder subsequent analogical thinking
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Show full item recordEditorial
PLOS
Date
2019-02-12Referencia bibliográfica
Valle TM, Gómez-Ariza CJ, Bajo MT (2019) Inhibitory control during selective retrieval may hinder subsequent analogical thinking. PLoS ONE 14(2): e0211881
Sponsorship
The study was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness grants FPU014/07066 to TMV, PSI2015-65502-C2-1-P to TB, PSI2015-65502-C2-2-P to CJGA and PCIN- 2015-165-C02-01 to TMV, TB and CJGAAbstract
Analogical reasoning is a complex cognitive activity that involves access and retrieval of
pre-existing knowledge in order to find a suitable solution. Prior work has shown that analogical
transfer and reasoning can be influenced by unconscious activation of relevant information.
Based on this idea, we report two experiments that examine whether reduced access
to relevant information in memory may further disrupt analogical reasoning unwittingly. In
both experiments, we use an adaptation of the retrieval practice paradigm [1] to modulate
memory accessibility of potential solutions to a subsequent set of analogy problems of the
type ‘A is to B as C is to ?’. Experiment 1 showed a retrieval-induced impairment in analogical
problem solving. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and demonstrated that it cannot be
due to the deliberative episodic retrieval of the solutions to the analogies. These findings,
predictable from an inhibitory framework of memory control, provide a new focus for theories
of analogical transfer and highlight the importance of unconscious memory processes that
may modulate problem solving.