Memory最新文献

We know much about people's problematic reactions-such as distressing intrusions-to negative, stressful, or traumatic past events. But emerging evidence suggests people react similarly to negative and potentially-traumatic future events. Given similar processes underlie remembering the past and imagining the future more generally, we wondered how similar involuntary memories, or intrusions, are for experienced vs. anticipated events. We focused primarily on intrusions because they are a transdiagnostic reaction to traumatic events. We asked subjects to report either a very stressful event they had experienced in the past 6 months, or one they anticipated they could experience in the next 6 months. We measured the frequency of intrusions about these reported events, and intrusions' phenomenological characteristics (such as emotional intensity), negative appraisals about their meaning, and reactions to them more generally. Overall, we found intrusions about experienced vs. anticipated autobiographical events were similarly troubling. This pattern supports the idea that anticipating the future can be aversive and elicit post-traumatic-stress-like symptoms, just as remembering the past can. Our findings have implications for theoretical models of traumatic-stress and treatment of traumatic-stress symptoms.

We extend Conway's self-memory system by adding theory and data from shame, an emotion that disrupts the internalised ideals of society needed for a positive self-concept. The event that caused 273 undergraduates their greatest amount of shame was analyzed; 66% were not very negative except for producing shame. Ratings of post-event effects, including two measure of self (self-perceived weakness, and centrality to identity) and four clinical symptoms (intrusions, avoidance, anxiety, and depression), were attributed separately to the remembered event, behaviour during the event, and shame from the event. The effects of shame were generally as large as the those of the event and larger than those of the behaviour, demonstrating the importance of shame's effects. The Tonic Immobility Scale (TIS), which measures tonic immobility (i.e., freezing), was obtained for the event that produced the most tonic immobility but that was not the event that caused the most shame. The post-event symptoms measured on the event that caused the most shame and the TIS correlated highly, suggesting that shame and tonic immobility may belong to a cluster of phylogenetically conserved submissive defensive mechanisms that could account for effects currently attributed to goals in self-memory systems.

Martin Conway's influential theorising about the self-memory system (Conway, M. A., & Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. (2000). The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological Review, 107(2), 261-288) illuminated how the "working self" influences the construction of autobiographical memories. Moreover, his constructive view of self and memory is compatible with the occurrence of various kinds of errors and distortions in remembering. Here we consider one of the "seven sins" of memory (Schacter, D. L. (2021). The seven sins of memory updated edition: How the mind forgets and remembers. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) that we believe is most closely related to the operation of Conway's self-memory system: bias, which refers to the role of current knowledge, beliefs, and feelings in shaping and sometimes distorting memories for past experiences and attitudes. More specifically, we discuss recent research on three forms of bias - consistency, self-enhancing, and positivity biases - that illuminate their role in influencing how people remember the past and also imagine the future. We consider both theoretical and applied aspects of these biases and, consistent with Conway's perspective, argue that despite sometimes contributing to inaccuracies, bias also serves adaptive functions.

We tested the validity of two alternative accounts of the Attentional Boost Effect (ABE) - the finding that words associated with to-be-responded targets are recognized better than words associated with to-be-ignored distractors. The distinctiveness hypothesis assumes that, during recognition, participants probe their memories for distinctive information confirming that a word was studied (e.g., "I remember having pressed the spacebar, so I must have studied the word"). This strategy cannot be used in a between-subjects condition in which participants cannot appreciate the differences between target - and distractor-paired words. In agreement, Experiments 1A and 1B found that the ABE was significant in a within-subjects design, whereas it was eliminated in a between-subjects design. On the other hand, the performance anticipation hypothesis assumes that, during the study phase, participants anticipate the need of responding to a subset of target-paired words: this would create a persistent performance anticipation that would prevent them from effectively encoding distractor-paired words. In contrast with this account, we found that, when blocks of five distractor trials were regularly alternated with blocks of five target trials in Experiment 2, recognition accuracy decreased linearly in both conditions. Overall, these results suggest that distinctiveness, but not performance anticipation, might underlie the ABE.

Previous studies have found that music evokes more vivid and emotional memories of autobiographical events than various other retrieval cues. However, it is possible such findings can be explained by pre-existing differences between disparate events that are retrieved in response to each cue type. To test whether music exhibits differential effects to other cues even when memory encoding is controlled, we compared music and environmental sounds as cues for memories of the same set of dynamic visual scenes. Following incidental encoding of 14 scenes (7 with music, 7 with sounds), the music and sounds were presented to participants (N = 56), who were asked to describe the scenes associated with these cues, and rate various memory properties. Music elicited fewer correct memories and more effortful retrieval than sound cues, and no difference was found in memory detail/vividness between cue types. However, music-evoked memories were rated as more positive and less arousing. These findings provide important critical insights that only partially support the common notion that music differs from other cue types in its effects on episodic memory retrieval.

Retrieval practice typically benefits learning in children, although little is known about the benefits of retrieval practice for learning spelling. We investigated this issue in three experiments with fifth-grade children from a low-income area of Brazil. In the experiments, children first read a list of words (study), and after a short interval wrote down the studied words after hearing and rereading them (copy) or after only hearing them (retrieval practice). After an interval of 4 days, spelling performance was greater for words from the retrieval practice condition than for words from the copy condition, but only when immediate corrective feedback was provided (Experiment 3). The current findings, therefore, suggest that retrieval practice followed by corrective feedback is an effective strategy to improve spelling performance of fifth-grade children.

Forgetting is an important phenomenon in working memory. Understanding forgetting could offer a window into the very core of cognition. According to the removal hypothesis, forgetting occurs because distractors interfere with memory traces, and this interference can be actively removed. In the decay refresh hypothesis, forgetting occurs because the memory trace decays with time and can be recovered by refreshment. In the present study, a multidistractor complex span task was designed to directly test the cause of forgetting. The free time after a particular distractor and the total free time were manipulated, with the priming effect of the repeated distractor as a detector. The results showed that a longer free time after the first distractor weakened the priming effect, but a longer total free time had no influence. These results supported the removal hypothesis. The forgetting of distractors was not due to decay but due to removal. The trace of a distractor would be removed when it stops being processed. The removal of a distractor occurs when individuals have free time directly after it, whereas the free time after another distractor is not beneficial.

Border control officers may be on the lookout for wanted people while they verify that travellers match their passport photos. We developed a novel experimental paradigm to investigate whether people are more likely to report that someone is wanted if they also believe that person is using a fraudulent passport. In two experiments, undergraduate students assumed the role of a border control officer and completed multiple "shifts" of a face matching task designed to simulate a passport verification check. Before each shift participants viewed posters of wanted people and were instructed to report any sightings if a wanted person appeared in any of the images during the passport check. Participants were more likely to say an individual was wanted if they also believed the person did not match their passport image. In addition, the accuracy of wanted person sightings was reduced for trials with nonmatching passports compared to trials with matching passports. This suggests wanted people with matching passports were easier to spot because participants had an additional image to compare with their memory of the person in the wanted poster.

Research shows that parents' self-worth may be contingent on their children's performance, with implications for their interactions with children. This study examined whether such child-based worth is manifested in parents' recognition memory. Parents of school-age children in China (N = 527) reported on their child-based worth and completed a recognition memory task involving evaluative trait adjectives encoded in three conditions: self-reference, child-reference, and semantic processing. The more parents had child-based worth, the more they exhibited a child-reference effect - superior recognition memory of evaluative trait adjectives encoded with reference to the child rather than semantically. Parents exhibited the classic self-reference effect in comparisons of recognition memory between the self-reference and semantic processing conditions, but this effect was not evidenced among parents high in child-based worth. Only parents low in child-based worth exhibited the self-reference effect in comparisons between the self-reference and child-reference conditions. Findings suggest that when parents hinge their self-worth on children's performance, evaluative information related to children may be an elaborate structure in memory.

Mnemonic representations of complex events are multidimensional, incorporating information about objects and characters, their interactions and their spatial-temporal context. The present study investigated the degree to which detailed verbal information (i.e., dialogues), as well as semantic and spatiotemporal (i.e., "what", "where", and "when") elements of episodic memories for movies, are forgotten over the course of a week. Moreover, we tested whether the amount of dimension-specific forgetting differed as a function of the participant's age. In a mixed design, younger and middle-aged participants were asked to watch a ∼90 min movie and provide yes/no answers to detailed questions about different dimensions of the presented material after 1, 3 days, and 1 week. The results indicate that memory decay mainly affects the verbal dimension, both in terms of response accuracy and confidence. Instead, detailed information about objects/characters' features and spatiotemporal context seems to be relatively preserved, despite a general decrease in response confidence. Furthermore, younger adults were in general more accurate and confident than middle-aged participants, although, again, the verbal dimension exhibited a significant age-related difference. We propose that this selective forgetting depends on the progressive advantage of visual compared to auditory/verbal information in memory for complex events.