Human attention and memory

人类的注意力和记忆力

• 批准号: 222975-2006
• 负责人: TaylorHelmick, Tracy
• 金额: $ 1.97万
• 依托单位: Dalhousie University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2006-01-01 至 2007-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=333384
• 关键词: Human; attention; memory

Forgetting is often viewed as a failure of memory.  We lament misplaced items, missed appointments, and past experiences that cannot be brought immediately to mind.  In his popular psychology book, Daniel Schacter describes the transience that characterizes forgetting as one of the "seven sins of memory."  But forgetting is not always a failure of memory.  Instead, forgetting often works in the service of memory.  By expunging irrelevant, incorrect, or outdated information, intentional forgetting enables us to focus our limited cognitive resources on relevant, correct, and current information. While it is true that we attempt to limit the encoding and retrieval of to-be-forgotten information, we do not achieve this through simple decay of the item representations or their memory traces.  Instead, we use active attentional mechanisms to limit input and output interference from to-be-forgotten information.  The goal of my work is to explore the nature of these attentional mechanisms and to determine how they subserve forgetting.  I am especially interested in the role that attentional inhibition plays in preventing to-be-forgotten information from being stored in long term memory. By employing cognitive behavioural methods with healthy human volunteers, my research will generate knowledge about how the intention to forget is instantiated in behaviour.  This is a unique perspective because rather than focusing exclusively on the question of how attention operates in the service of remembering, it addresses the equally important issue of how attention operates in the service of forgetting.  Especially given the fact that difficulties in forgetting are implicated in general memory impairments as well as in some clinical disorders, this knowledge will contribute to cognitive models of normal as well as impaired memory function.

遗忘通常被认为是记忆力的失败。我们为放错地方的东西、错过的约会和无法立即想起的过去经历而哀叹。丹尼尔·沙克特在他的流行心理学著作中将遗忘的短暂性描述为“记忆的七宗罪”之一。“但遗忘并不总是记忆的失败。相反，遗忘往往是为记忆服务的。通过删除不相关的、不正确的或过时的信息，故意遗忘使我们能够将有限的认知资源集中在相关的、正确的和当前的信息上。虽然我们确实试图限制对要被遗忘的信息的编码和检索，但我们并不是通过简单地衰减项目表征或它们的记忆痕迹来实现这一点。我们使用积极的注意力机制来限制来自未来的输入和输出干扰，我的工作目标是探索这些注意机制的本质，并确定它们是如何促进遗忘的。我特别感兴趣的是注意力抑制在防止被遗忘的信息被储存在长期记忆中所起的作用。通过对健康的志愿者采用认知行为方法，我的研究将产生关于遗忘意图如何在行为中体现的知识。这是一个独特的视角，因为与其专注于注意力如何在记忆中发挥作用的问题，它解决了同样重要的问题，即注意力是如何为遗忘服务的。特别是考虑到遗忘的困难是涉及一般的记忆障碍以及一些临床障碍，这一知识将有助于正常以及受损的记忆功能的认知模型。