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

自我中心。自私自恋狂。社交媒体时代普及了这样一种观念，即人们现在认为自己比其他任何东西都重要（Sedikides et al.，2018年）。当注意力集中在自己身上时，人们可能无法注意、处理和记住周围的其他重要事情。这项拟议中的研究将通过将人们亚临床自恋倾向的个体差异与他们的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识别和忘记了什么（项目1），为什么他们识别这些特定的东西（项目2），以及可能改变这一点的因素。人类记忆的基础模型是一条链，通过它人们感知、处理和记住特定的刺激而不是其他刺激（Hitch等人，2018年）。而突出的目标往往吸引注意力，缺乏区别的刺激（例如，名声、个人相关性或其他显著特征）通常不具有这些特征;因此，人们后来无法识别这些目标。例如，人们往往会注意到并记住与自己相同型号的汽车（Bourgeois等人，2016）。相似的汽车的自我相关性不仅吸引了注意力，而且有助于将自己的车辆与其他车辆区分开来（就像在拥挤的停车场一样）。在这里，注意力通过将认知资源定向到一个特定的对象并对其进行编码以备后用（将我的钥匙插入正确的车辆）来喂养记忆。因此，一件事的相关性和它的独特性共同决定了一个人是否成功地记住了它。人们因此记住了对他们个人重要的人、地点和物体（罗杰斯等人，1977年），但也可能记住那些并不特别重要的事情，如果它们突出的话（例如，一只罕见的黑天鹅在一群白色鸟中游泳; Hunt，2003）。在这里，我将确定个体基本行为特征的变异性（即，亚临床自恋（subclinical narcissism）预测人们对事物的认知程度。在试验数据中，我的实验室发现，报告亚临床自恋水平较高的人识别的面孔较少。项目1将证实这一结果，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如何解释这种缺陷来挖掘这种缺陷的机制（例如，努力、分心、视觉认知差异）。最后，项目3将询问感知者的动机如何有助于这些机制，同时间接地告知改善策略。这项研究将有助于通过将个体特征差异与记忆的基本功能和过程联系起来，阐明关于心灵和人类行为的基本知识。在这样做的过程中，这项工作将产生一个更丰富的理解，个人如何在他们记住的东西，他们为什么记得，当他们记得，以及如何根据一个人的性格的基本要素可能会有所不同。

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.