Testing system-wide principles of memory

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In most areas of scientific inquiry, there are laws and principles that are the foundation of research and theory within that domain. In the study of human memory, however, there are no laws and few widely-accepted principles. One reason offered for the lack of laws and principles is that memory is not a unitary system. Because each memory system operates according to different rules, discovering general laws or principles of memory is not possible. Recently, my colleagues and I argued that principles of memory do exist and we described seven principles that apply regardless of the underlying hypothetical memory system. The objective of the proposed research program is to evaluate novel predictions derived from the general principles and to generate new principles. Three areas will be examined in detail. (1) In most areas of memory, distinctive items (i.e., a red word in a list of black words) are remembered better than non-distinct items. One problem for a principle based on distinctiveness is that this effect is not reliably observed when tests tap implicit memory. (2) Researchers have identified several 'signature' results that indicate that a person is utilizing short-term memory on a particular task. One key finding compares memory in a quiet control condition to one in which people engage in concurrent articulation (saying some irrelevant items, such as the numbers 1-5, out loud, over and over). The standard view argues that concurrent articulation selectively affects the articulatory control process of working memory. In contrast, the proposed research will investigate whether tasks with no phonological or articulatory component have similar effects, thereby testing a proposed new principle of secondary task effects. (3) Although most memory research uses verbal stimuli, there is a robust literature on non-verbal and especially procedural memory (i.e., knowing "how" as opposed to knowing "that"). The paradigms used to study procedural memory, however, are not conducive to assessing whether the proposed principles apply. The third line of research will develop paradigms for studying principles in tasks thought to tap procedural memory, and will then directly compare the applicability of each principle to procedural and declarative memory tasks.