Testing the generality of the specificity principle 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 have argued that principles of memory do exist and we described seven principles that we argued apply regardless of the underlying hypothetical memory system. The objective of research outlined in this proposal is to evaluate novel predictions derived from one of the general principles; the specificity principle. The specificity principle states that those tasks that require the retrieval of a unique piece of information, a single event, or a specific item, are more vulnerable to interference or more likely to result in reduced performance than those tasks that can be completed using generic or gist-based information. The scientific approach will be to vary the specificity of the information being probed by a particular task and show that it is that variable, not the memory system the task is meant to selectively query, that is the critical determinant of performance. Younger and older adults will be tested on tasks including recall, recognition, stem completion, graphemic cued recall, and generate/read manipulations. The long-term goal of this program of research is to test the principles framework as it pertains to the specificity principle. The short term goals include 1) examining specificity across multiple tasks; 2) testing specificity by predicting the interaction of age and stimulus effects in a variety of tasks; and 3) examining effects of distraction on the information retrieved from memory. The overarching aims of the research program are to continue to test the limits of the principles approach and, whenever possible, to avoid confirmation bias by designing experiments in such a way that it is possible to disconfirm the principle. The proposed program of research will consolidate seemingly diverse findings under a single principle and will add evidence to the fundamental debate on how to characterize memory: as a collection of systems that follow different rules or as a variety of processes that differ depending on the task at hand. In addition, the data will support or refute a general deficit explanation of age-related differences in memory performance.