Foundations of Social Metamemory

社会元记忆的基础

• 批准号: 2317124
• 负责人: Ian Dobbins
• 金额: $ 57.4万
• 依托单位: Washington University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-09-01 至 2026-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2317124&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Foundations; Social; Metamemory

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.

通过语言有效交流记忆的能力是人类独有的。它对我们的社交生活也至关重要，影响着夫妻如何共同回忆他们的生活，体育迷如何记住一个赛季，或者陪审员如何在审判期间确定证人的可信度。这个项目帮助我们理解了分享记忆的非凡能力，沿着的信息是这些记忆可能是，也可能不是，对过去的可靠描述。对自己记忆准确性的自我反思被称为元记忆。尽管认知科学家对此进行了广泛的研究，但人们对人们如何使用语言来传达他们记忆的质量或其他人如何使用这种语言来决定这些记忆是否可靠知之甚少。因为人们不仅对别人说什么很敏感，而且对他们说的方式也很敏感，所以这个项目专门研究了评估别人的记忆如何取决于他们所说的话之外的言语特征。最后，由于个人经常遇到与自己口音不同的人，该项目研究了口音差异如何限制或偏见个人的能力，以确定其他人的记忆报告是否准确。为了有效地分享集体行动或决策的记忆，证人不仅必须传达记忆的内容，而且还必须表明记忆的可靠性。反过来，这些记忆理由的评估者或法官应该只在他们被认为是准确的范围内依赖它们。目前的项目研究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，它测试的假设，即法官处理的内容和韵律信息时，评估证人的记忆，他们可能会这样做相对独立，并有效地沟通和评估这些信息流的能力可能会受到不同的影响，重要的个人差异，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）。为了客观地对证人传达的内容进行评分，该项目使用经过训练的机器学习算法来区分自然语言伴随的准确与不准确的记忆理由，将其表现与人类评估者的表现进行比较。它还训练这些机器学习者来确定人类评估者认为特别重要的单词和短语，并操纵通信格式，对比转录的记忆理由（仅文本），原始音频记录以及对这些记录的修改，这些修改大大减少了可用的内容或韵律信息。这反映了第一个记忆研究，研究法官如何整合这两个信息流时，评估他人的记忆。最后，这种方法被扩展到社会元记忆的交流与不同的语言背景的扬声器之间的比较母语英语的人的能力，有效地评估记忆的理由的人谁说英语作为第一语言与第二语言。由于世界上大多数英语使用者都将英语作为第二语言，因此这项研究的延伸具有重大的社会意义。该奖项反映了NSF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。