Foundations of Social Metamemory

通过语言有效交流记忆的能力是人类独有的。它对我们的社会生活也至关重要，影响情侣如何共同回忆他们的共同生活，体育迷如何记住一个赛季，或者陪审员如何在审判中确定证人的可信度。这个项目帮助我们理解了分享记忆的非凡能力，这些记忆可能是，也可能不是，对过去的可靠描述。关于自己记忆准确性的自我反省被称为元记忆。尽管认知科学家对此进行了广泛的研究，但对于人们如何使用语言来传达他们记忆的质量，或者其他人如何使用这种语言来判断这些记忆是否可靠，人们知之甚少。因为人们不仅对别人说的话很敏感，而且对他们说话的方式也很敏感，所以这个项目专门研究了评估一个人的记忆力是如何依赖于他们所说的话之外的语言特征的。最后，由于人们经常会遇到口音与自己不同的人，因此该项目研究了口音差异如何限制或影响个人判断他人记忆报告是否准确的能力。为了有效地分享集体行动或决策的记忆，证人不仅要传达记忆的内容，还要表明其可靠性。反过来，这些记忆证明的评估者或判断者应该只在它们被认为是准确的程度上依赖它们。当前的项目考察了在这种交流中说话的内容和方式是如何运作的。更具体地说，它验证了法官在评价证人的记忆时同时处理内容和韵律信息的假设，他们可能相对独立地这样做，有效沟通和评估这些信息流的能力可能受到识别记忆能力、自我评价自己的记忆（元记忆）、言语智商和工作记忆容量（WMC）的重要个体差异的不同影响。为了客观地对目击者传达的内容进行评分，该项目使用了经过训练的机器学习算法，以区分伴随准确和不准确记忆的自然语言，并将其表现与人类对相同陈述的评估进行比较。它还训练这些机器学习者确定人类评估者认为特别重要的单词和短语，并操纵交流的格式，对比转录的记忆证明（仅文本），原始录音，以及对这些录音的修改，这些录音大大减少了可用的内容或韵律信息。这反映了第一个关于判断者在评价他人记忆时如何整合这两种信息流的记忆研究。最后，通过比较以英语为母语的人和以英语为第二语言的人有效评估记忆合理性的能力，将这种方法扩展到不同语言背景的人之间的社会元记忆交流。因为世界上大多数说英语的人都把英语作为第二语言来学习，所以这项研究的延伸具有重要的社会意义。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The ability to effectively communicate memories through language is uniquely human. It is also critical to our social lives, affecting how couples jointly remember their lives together, sports fans remember a season, or how jurors determine the credibility of witnesses during trials. This project help us understand the remarkable ability to share memories along with the information that those memories may, or may not, be reliable descriptions of the past. Self-reflection about the accuracy of your own memory is referred to as metamemory. Although cognitive scientists have studied this extensively, little is known about how people use language to communicate the quality of their memories or how others use this language to decide whether those memories are reliable. Because people are not only sensitive to what others say, but also how they say it, this project specifically examines how evaluating someone else’s memory depends upon characteristics of their speech beyond the words they are saying. Finally, because individuals often encounter others with accents different from their own, the project examines how accent differences may limit or bias the ability of individuals to determine if the memory reports of others are accurate or not. To effectively share memories for collective action or decision-making, witnesses must convey not only the content of memories, but also signal their reliability. In turn, evaluators or judges of these memory justifications should rely upon them only to the extent they are deemed accurate. The current project examines how the content and manner of speaking operate during such communication. More specifically, it tests the hypothesis that judges process both content and prosody information when evaluating witnesses’ memories, that they may do so relatively independently, and that the ability to effectively communicate and evaluate these information streams may be differentially impacted by important individual differences in recognition memory ability, self-evaluation of one’s own memories (metamemory), Verbal IQ, and working memory capacity (WMC). To objectively score the content communicated by witnesses, the project uses machine learning algorithms trained to discriminate the natural language accompanying accurate versus inaccurate memory justifications comparing their performance to human evaluators of the same statements. It also trains these machine learners to determine the words and phrases that human evaluators find particularly important and manipulates the format of communication, contrasting transcribed memory justifications (text only), the original audio recordings, and modifications of those recordings that greatly reduce either the content or the prosodic information that is available. This reflects the first memory research to examine how judges integrate these two streams of information when evaluating others’ memory. Finally, this approach is extended to social metamemory communication between speakers with different language backgrounds by comparing native English speakers’ ability to effectively evaluate the memory justifications of people who speak English as a first versus a second language. Because most English speakers world-wide have acquired English as a second language, this extension of the research has significant societal importance.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.