Adaptive Memory

适应性记忆

• 批准号: 1532345
• 负责人: James Nairne
• 金额: $ 37.73万
• 依托单位: Purdue University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-08-15 至 2018-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1532345&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Adaptive; Memory

Identifying and understanding factors that improve human memory is one of the central aims of human memory research, with important societal implications for education, training, enhancing cognitive performance, and rehabilitating the memory-impaired. This project investigates a recently discovered means of improving memory known as the survival processing effect, whereby thinking about an item in terms of its potential survival utility in an imagined survival scenario greatly improves memory for that item relative to other known mnemonic techniques. This project is aimed at understanding why the survival processing benefit to memory occurs. Specifically, what are the underlying mechanisms responsible for the dramatic levels of memory improvement shown over other known memory-enhancing techniques? Is a deeply ingrained evolutionary basis responsible, or can the effect be explained by factors such as increased encoding variability brought on by the type of elaboration involved in imagining the survival scenarios? Understanding this will increase understanding of the overall operation of human memory more generally, including the basis of dramatic memory improvement in certain situations. Based on this understanding, this project will additionally attempt to identify and investigate other ways in which memory for particular items might be improved over and above the improvement shown using well-established mnemonic techniques. The research team will investigate hypotheses concerning the possible proximate mechanisms that produce the enhanced memory in imagined survival situations. For example, survival processing may naturally lead to variable encodings, or connections to other things in memory, that benefit later retrieval. To test this hypothesis, experiments are proposed that limit (or not) the extent to which people can use variable encodings to aid retrieval after survival-based processing. In addition to attempting to identify the proximate mechanisms of the survival processing effect, the research team will also explore a new area by investigating the mnemonic consequences of potential imagined contamination--do people remember objects that are said to have been touched by a sick person better than those said to have been touched by a healthy person? Avoiding contamination is extremely relevant to survival, and preliminary research suggests that people preferentially remember potentially contaminated objects; thus, this is a promising new area to explore beyond survival processing.

识别和理解改善人类记忆的因素是人类记忆研究的中心目标之一，对教育、培训、提高认知能力和记忆受损者的康复具有重要的社会影响。该项目研究了最近发现的一种称为生存处理效应的改善记忆的方法，即相对于其他已知的助记技术，在想象的生存场景中考虑一个项目的潜在生存效用可以大大提高对该项目的记忆。该项目旨在了解为什么生存处理对记忆有益。具体来说，与其他已知的记忆增强技术相比，记忆力显着提高的根本机制是什么？是根深蒂固的进化基础造成的，还是这种影响可以用诸如想象生存场景所涉及的详尽阐述类型所带来的编码变异性增加等因素来解释？了解这一点将更广泛地增进对人类记忆整体运作的理解，包括在某些情况下记忆力显着提高的基础。基于这种理解，该项目将另外尝试识别和研究其他方法，除了使用成熟的助记技术所显示的改进之外，还可以提高对特定项目的记忆。研究小组将研究有关在想象的生存情况下产生增强记忆的可能近似机制的假设。例如，生存处理可能自然会导致可变编码或与内存中其他事物的连接，这有利于以后的检索。为了检验这一假设，提出了一些实验来限制（或不限制）人们在基于生存的处理后使用变量编码来帮助检索的程度。除了试图确定生存处理效应的近似机制外，研究小组还将通过调查潜在想象污染的记忆后果来探索一个新领域——人们是否记得据说被病人触摸过的物体比那些据说被健康人摸过的更好吗？避免污染与生存极为相关，初步研究表明，人们优先记住可能被污染的物体；因此，这是一个超越生存处理的有前景的新领域。