With the rise of smartphones with high-quality digital cameras, we are constantly deciding when and where to take photographs. All of this photo-taking is likely to influence how we interact with and subsequently remember personal events. A photo-taking-impairment effect has been observed such that objects that are photographed can be remembered less well than objects that are not photographed on a subsequent memory test. This effect and other memory effects of interacting with digital technology have been widely cited as evidence that a transactive memory system exists in which users of digital devices can rely on the memory of those digital devices, and so engage in cognitive offloading of memory onto those devices. Several experiments are reported here that provide evidence against an explicit or strategic cognitive offloading account. Two experiments are presented that demonstrate a photo-taking impairment effect even when participants cannot rely on their camera to remember for them, because photos are never saved or are immediately deleted from the device. If participants only offloaded onto a camera when it was strategically advantageous, the photo-taking-impairment effect would at least be attenuated in these delete conditions. Nonetheless, participants still demonstrated the photo-taking-impairment effect. Three more experiments are presented in which participants consistently predicted that photographed objects would be better remembered than non-photographed objects on a subsequent memory test. If participants believed that they had strategically offloaded memory onto the camera, they would have predicted the opposite pattern—relative under-confidence in photographed objects relative to non-photographed objects. Together, these two sets of studies provide evidence against a strategic offloading account. A third set of two studies is presented in which participants were asked to review their own naturalistically taken photos, and report on their recollective experience prompted by reviewing those photos. Both studies provide evidence that photo-taking goals may be important in determining how photographed events are recollected. Informed by these findings, a theoretical framework that characterizes the transactive memory system that might be formed between photo-takers and their cameras is proposed. Photo-taking goals are central to this theoretical framework. Implications and future directions are discussed.

This Dissertation investigated the interplay between executive function, creative thinking, and examples. Over 200 participants completed this experiment consisting of a battery of five creative thinking tasks and a battery of seven executive function tasks. All participants completed two different versions of each of the creative thinking tasks, one version with the help of examples to get them started on idea generation and one version without the help of examples. Data were analyzed both as latent and observed variables.

Key results indicated that: (1) participants generated ideas that were rated as more creative when they had the help of examples than when they did not have examples; (2) executive function (particularly inhibition) was positively related to creativity in both conditions; (3) the role of executive function was not observed to depend on whether examples were involved in the idea generation process; and (4) conformity to examples was not observed to mediate the relation between executive function and creativity.

The current research adapted Einstein and McDaniel's (1990) prospective memory (PM)paradigm to explore how people manage multiple memory tasks while offloading some but not others. Participants engaged in an ongoing categorization task while monitoring for two specific PM cues. In an Offload condition, participants offloaded one of the two PM tasks, receiving reminders for that specific cue. In a Dual PM condition, participants remembered both PMs internally. This study aimed to address three specific hypotheses: (1) offloading one PM task would improve performance on a concurrent non-offloaded PM task, (2) offloading PMs is not entirely efficient and would lead to worse performance on non-offloaded PMs compared to a single PM condition, and (3) participants would show worse performance on a PM task when offloading was no longer available due to lack of practice. Performance was measured in terms of PM accuracy, reaction times, and ongoing task performance. We consistently failed to find evidence that offloading one PM led to improved performance on a concurrent non-offloaded PM. In some cases, offloading led to impaired performance on non-offloaded PMs. When participants were later required to perform previously offloaded tasks without reminders, their performance was consistently worse compared to those who had practiced these tasks without offloading. These findings challenge the assumption that offloading simply frees up cognitive resources for reallocation to other tasks and may stem from limited flexibility in PM-related cognitive processes, hidden cognitive costs associated with offloading, or metacognitive illusions. These mechanisms, however, relied on the assumption that remembering 2 PMs requires more cognitive resources than remembering a single PM, and that offloading would reduce cognitive demands. In Experiment 1, however, participants did not perform better when they had a single PM compared to when they remembered two PMs. There may be benefits to remembering two PMs concurrently, possibly due to the increased frequency of cues with the additional PM; if so, offloading may hinder PM Performance. The current research suggests that while reminders improve immediate task completion, they may reduce performance on concurrent PM tasks and circumvent practice effects that strengthen PM learning.

When playing a metaphorical game, what is the role of the player’s interpretation in the game’s emotional impact? If players are consciously aware of the metaphor, do they experience a stronger effect of that metaphor? This dissertation extends part of the debate on deliberate metaphor (Gibbs, 2015b; Steen, 2008, 2017) into the empirical space of video games. Participants played a version of the game Loneliness (Magnuson, 2007). In the game, the player controls a square. When the player approaches other squares, the other squares move away as if rejecting the player. Since this game communicates primarily through the metaphor AFFECTION IS PROXIMITY, any change in the player’s emotions can be attributed to this metaphor. In a series of experiments, participants played the game described above, a variation on that game in which the other squares approach the player’s square, or Tetris as a baseline. Participants self-reported their emotional state before and after playing the game, and the change from before to after was the primary dependent variable. Experiment 1 established that Loneliness influences feelings of loneliness and acceptedness and piloted methods of measuring participants' perceptions of metaphor deliberateness. In Experiment 2, participants who played Loneliness were split into Aware and Unaware groups based on ratings of agreement with statements adapted from Gibbs (2015b). The Aware showed a significant change in both loneliness and acceptedness, while the Unaware and baseline groups showed little or no change. These results are interpreted based on a set of hypotheses motivated by the paradox of metaphor (Steen, 2008, 2017), responses to the paradox (Gibbs, 2015), and implicit metaphor studies (Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011, 2013). The overall pattern of results is consistent deliberate metaphor theory, in that conscious awareness of metaphor in Loneliness seems to be critical to its emotional impact.

Pretesting, or answering a question prior to learning the associated information is a powerful tool for learning. By the nature of this type of test, learners are likely to answer a question wrong. In this dissertation, I will explore the idea that the incorrect guesses may lead to competition (i.e., source monitoring and/or cue overload/ response competition) between the correct answer and the incorrect guess. If this is the case, any benefit of pretesting is found in spite of this potential competition, and making more incorrect guesses should lead to worsened performance compared to making a single guess. However, theories behind the pretesting benefit (i.e., Retrieval Effort Hypothesis, Elaborative Retrieval Hypothesis, Episodic Context Account) would all predict the opposite- that making multiple guesses in response to a pretest question would lead to an increase in benefit for later memory. Three experiments were conducted here to determine situations in which generating more guesses as responses to pretest questions will be beneficial or detrimental for learning. Experiment 1 compared the effects of one and three pretest guesses to a read-only control on a final, cued-recall test. Experiment 2 replicated experiment 1 and added a comparison condition in which participants were exposed to prior participants’ guesses. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 1 with the final test changed to multiple-choice and timing being recorded and analyzed across conditions. Across the three experiments, a consistent benefit of making pretesting guesses was found, however, no additional benefit or detriment was found for conditions in which three guesses were made as opposed to one. In short, despite clear reasons derived from the literature to expect that memory might be improved or impaired by the inclusion of extra guesses, no evidence was found to suggest that this is the case. This has important practical implications for teachers and learners looking to implement pretest guessing into their instruction and study strategies as well as implications for the theoretical understanding of the pretesting effect.

People are inherently creative in that they produce ideas to solve problems often in their everyday lives. Work on idea production has investigated the role of viewing examples on people’s ability to think of new ideas, to mixed results. Some work has found that people experience fixation when they are exposed to examples that are meant to help them think more creatively (demonstrating a negative effect on the ability to think of new ideas), while other work has shown that being shown examples can be helpful for producing more creative ideas (demonstrating a positive effect). However, no work to date has examined the effect of 1) different sources of examples (i.e., self- vs. other-generated), and 2) the manner in which one interacts with these examples on creative thinking (i.e., retrieving, restudying, or doing nothing with those ideas). To examine these effects, the set of experiments in this dissertation utilized a modified version of the Alternative Uses Task to investigate the effects of example type and interaction method on the ability to generate new ideas. In these experiments, participants were asked to generate their own examples or study someone else’s examples in two phases, where the ideas from the initial phase served as examples for the second phase. Before thinking of additional ideas, participants were asked to interact with the example ideas in different ways (i.e., retrieve from memory, restudy, or do nothing with them). Results from these experiments demonstrate that recalling and restudying a diverse set of initial examples—whether one’s own or someone else’s—may not induce measurable differential effects in the Alternative Uses Task. The results from these experiments add to the growing literature on idea generation ability after exposure to examples in a number of important ways.

Gestures can both enhance and modify memory for speech when produced alongside it. Although much research has documented the beneficial effects of gesture, far less work has examined the boundaries of the benefits of gesture as well as the mechanisms by which it influences memory. The following series of experiments aimed to understand how and when gesture and speech are represented in memory in an attempt to construct a foundation for how gesture influences what listeners remember. The conditions under which gesture is coactivated during the retrieval of speech were investigated by measuring subsequent memory for gesture across six experiments. In each experiment, participants watched videos of an individual saying brief statements and producing gestures followed by a test on what was said for half of these statements before finally being tested on their memory for gestures themselves. Gesture and speech were said to form an integrated representation in memory in cases where there was an observed improvement in recall of gesture after retrieval of speech.

Overall, these experiments suggest that gesture and speech are coactivated during the retrieval of speech and form an integrated representation in memory. Results provided evidence that such coactivation and thus integration by demonstrating a greater enhancement in memory for gesture after the retrieval of speech when gesture and speech are meaningfully related and irrespective of whether gesture is redundant with the contents of speech. The results also showed that the coactivation of gesture and speech during the retrieval of speech is episodic in nature, implying that the representation of gesture and speech in memory retains episodic details of the experience of watching a speaker talk and move. The experiments presented here help us to better understand how gesture and speech are represented in memory and how such representation may lead to the influence gesture has on memory for speech by directly assessing memory for gesture, when gesture and speech are coactivated, and what processes in retrieval maximally encourage such coactivation.