How Individual Differences in Attention and Memory Relate to Who Remembers What

注意力和记忆力的个体差异如何与谁记得什么有关

• 批准号: RGPIN-2020-05839
• 负责人: Rule, Nicholas
• 金额: $ 2.91万
• 依托单位: University of Toronto
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2020-01-01 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=718040
• 关键词: How; Individual; Differences; Attention; Memory

Egocentric. Self-absorbed. Narcissistic. The age of social media has popularized the idea that people now think of themselves more than anything else (Sedikides et al., 2018). With attention anchored on themselves, individuals may fail to notice, process, and remember other important things around them. The proposed research will quantify this deficit by relating individual differences in people's subclinical narcissistic tendencies to their recognition memory. In doing so, my team and I will identify what people recognize versus forget (Project 1), why they recognize those particular things (Project 2), and factors that might alter this. Foundational models of human memory posit a chain through which people perceive, process, and remember particular stimuli over others (Hitch et al., 2018). Whereas salient targets tend to captivate attention, stimuli that lack distinctions (e.g., fame, personal relevance, or otherwise remarkable features) often do not; people thus fail to recognize such targets later. For example, people tend to notice and remember cars of the same model as their own (Bourgeois et al., 2016). The similar car's self-relevance not only captures attention but serves the important purpose of helping to distinguish one's own vehicle from those of others (as in a crowded parking lot). Here, attention feeds memory by orienting cognitive resources to a particular object and encoding it for later use (inserting my key into the right vehicle). A thing's relevance and its distinctiveness thus collaborate to determine whether one successfully remembers it. People consequently remember people, places, and objects that matter to them personally (Rogers et al., 1977) but may also remember things that do not particularly matter if they stand out (e.g., a rare black swan swimming among a flock of white birds; Hunt, 2003). Here, I will determine how variability in individuals' basic behavioural traits (i.e., subclinical narcissism) predicts how well people recognize things. In pilot data, my lab found that individuals reporting higher levels of subclinical narcissism recognize fewer faces. Project 1 will confirm this result and establish whether it also applies to nonsocial stimuli. Project 2 will then exhume the mechanisms of this deficit by testing how various factors related to cognitive processing might explain it (e.g., effort, distraction, visual-cognitive differences). Finally, Project 3 will interrogate how perceivers' motivations contribute to those mechanisms while indirectly informing ameliorative tactics. This research will help to expound upon fundamental knowledge of the mind and human behaviour by relating individual trait differences to the basic functions and processes of memory. In doing so, the work will yield a richer understanding of how individuals vary in what they remember, why they remember, when they remember, and how this may vary according to basic elements of one's character.

以自我为中心。自我陶醉。自恋。社交媒体时代普及了这样一种观念：人们现在把自己看得比什么都重要（Sedikides et al., 2018）。由于注意力集中在自己身上，人们可能无法注意到、处理和记住周围的其他重要事物。拟议的研究将通过将人们亚临床自恋倾向的个体差异与其识别记忆联系起来来量化这种缺陷。在此过程中，我和我的团队将确定人们认识到的内容和忘记的内容（项目 1）、他们为何认识到这些特定的事物（项目 2）以及可能改变这种情况的因素。 人类记忆的基础模型提出了一条链条，人们通过这条链条感知、处理和记住特定的刺激（Hitch et al., 2018）。显着目标往往会吸引注意力，而缺乏区别（例如名誉、个人相关性或其他显着特征）的刺激通常不会；因此，人们后来无法识别这些目标。 例如，人们倾向于注意到并记住与自己型号相同的汽车（Bourgeois et al., 2016）。类似汽车的自我相关性不仅能吸引人们的注意，还能起到帮助区分自己的车辆与其他车辆的重要作用（例如在拥挤的停车场）。在这里，注意力通过将认知资源定向到特定物体并对其进行编码以供以后使用（将我的钥匙插入正确的车辆）来提供记忆。 因此，一件事的相关性和独特性共同决定了人们能否成功记住它。因此，人们会记住对他们个人来说重要的人、地方和物体（Rogers et al., 1977），但也可能会记住一些不太重要的事情，如果它们很突出的话（例如，一只罕见的黑天鹅在一群白鸟中游泳；Hunt, 2003）。 在这里，我将确定个人基本行为特征的变异性（即亚临床自恋）如何预测人们识别事物的能力。在试点数据中，我的实验室发现，亚临床自恋程度较高的人识别出的面孔较少。项目 1 将确认这一结果并确定它是否也适用于非社会刺激。然后，项目 2 将通过测试与认知处理相关的各种因素（例如，努力、分心、视觉认知差异）如何解释这种缺陷，从而挖掘这种缺陷的机制。最后，项目 3 将询问感知者的动机如何对这些机制做出贡献，同时间接告知改进策略。 这项研究将通过将个体特征差异与记忆的基本功能和过程联系起来，有助于阐明心灵和人类行为的基本知识。通过这样做，这项工作将更丰富地理解个体记忆的差异、为什么记忆、何时记忆，以及记忆如何根据一个人性格的基本要素而变化。