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

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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.