S&S Scholars Award: Sciences of Memory in the Twentieth Century

自传式记忆在19世纪成为持续科学研究的焦点，在最近几代，它已成为心理学研究中最具争议的话题之一。这个项目将研究记忆科学在英美社会的兴起。它开始于19世纪末，当时新生的心理学领域正在产生惊人的新方法来研究过去的事件是如何经历和记录的。然后，它考察了一系列追踪记忆科学命运的相关事件，以20世纪80年代和90年代的记忆战争结束。一个中心目标是检查心理专家不断变化的法律和文化地位。该项目研究实验、犯罪和案件对记忆法律地位的影响，以及记忆研究如何受到法律的影响。在更广泛的科学和法律研究中也讨论过类似的问题，但在法庭上表现出来的记忆是司法程序的关键方面，却没有得到持续的历史研究。该项目还考察了记忆和媒介之间的关系。20世纪的新记录技术（尤其是磁带录音机和电影）成为技术记忆的模型，并从中绘制出内部记忆的模型。该项目考察了记忆研究人员如何采用新技术，以及这些拨款如何针对特定社区的关注进行调整。方法：PI选择了一些具体的事件进行详细的档案调查，而不是试图通过更全面的方法来衡量如此庞大的主题。这种方法允许项目建立一个按时间顺序广泛的、适当的上下文和丰富的存档的帐户。一个连贯的故事从这些情节中浮现出来。但它们也提供了一个比较的理解，在不同的背景和时期是如何理解个人记忆的。作为一个整体，这项研究将是一个细致入微的社会历史记录，对这一主题来说是相当新的，它研究了不同的选区是如何提出要求并捍卫其权威的合法性的。它冒险进入法庭、心理实验室、精神科咨询室和大众媒体。由于记忆辩论构成了一个外行可以声称拥有直觉知识的领域，这段历史对现代科学专业知识的命运提供更广泛理解的潜力尤其有希望。不同寻常的专家团体心理学家、内科医生、精神分析学家、外科医生和其他人都声称记忆是他们专业知识的对象。因此，记忆的历史可以提供一个很好的案例，通过它我们可以询问专家群体之间的关系，以及他们与公众之间的关系。知识价值：该项目具有内在价值，因为它将通过一个尚未获得重要学术研究的主要领域绘制路径。其次，通过对科学和媒体中意义的相互建构的考察，对科学与媒体之间的关系有了新的认识。第三，它发展了一种新的视角来看待科学在法律中的作用，这个领域的学术研究远远不够。更广泛的影响：这项研究应该引起学术界以外的兴趣，因为它对外行和专家信念之间关系的看法将增强我们对现代社会及其代表——陪审团——如何评估证人证词的理解，证人证词仍然是刑事审判中证据的原型形式。这项研究的结果不仅将在学术期刊上传播，而且还将在一本面向专家和非专业读者的书中传播。

Project Summary Objectives: Autobiographical memory became the focus of sustained scientific study in the nineteenth century, and in recent generations it has become one of the most controversial topics of psychological research. This project will examine the rise of memory science in Anglo-American society. It begins at the end of the nineteenth century, when nascent psychological fields were producing dramatically new approaches to the study of how past events were experienced and recorded. It then examines a series of related episodes tracking the fate of memory science, ending with the memory wars of the 1980s and 1990s.A central objective is to examine the changing legal and cultural status of psychological expertise. The project studies the effects of experiments, crimes, and cases on the legal status of memory, and how memory research was affected by the law. Similar questions have been discussed in broader studies of science and the law, but memory as exhibited in the courtrooma crucial aspect of judicial processes has not received a sustained historical study. The project also examines the relationship between memory and media. The new recording technologies of the twentieth century (especially tape recorders and motion-pictures) became models of technological memory, and from them have been drawn models of internal memory. This project examines how new technologies were taken up by memory researchers, and how such appropriations were tailored to the concerns of particular communities. Methods: The PI has selected a number of specific episodes for detailed archival investigation, rather than attempting to take the measure of such a vast subject by a more comprehensive approach. This approach allows the project to build into an account that is at once chronologically broad, properly contextual, and richly archival. A coherent narrative emerges from these episodes. But they also furnish a comparative understanding of how personal memory was understood in different contexts and periods. The study as a whole will be a fine-grained social-historical account quite new for this subject that examines how different constituencies have staked claims and defended the legitimacy of their authority. It ventures into the courtroom, the psychological laboratory, the psychiatric consulting room, and popular media. Since memory debates constituted a field in which the lay public could claim to have intuitive knowledge, the potential of this history to deliver broader understandings of the fate of scientific expertise in the modern era is especially promising. And an unusually diverse range of communities of experts psychologists, physicians, psychoanalysts, surgeons, and others laid claim to memory as the object of their expertise. The history of memory can thus provide a good case through which we can interrogate the relationship between expert communities, and between them and the public. Intellectual merit : The project has intrinsic value in the path it will chart through a major area that has not as yet received significant scholarship. Second, it develops a new understanding of the relationship between science and media as an examination of the reciprocal construction of meaning in science and in media. Third, it develops a new perspective on the role of science in the law, in an area that has drawn less scholarship than it deserves. Broader impacts : This study should be of interest beyond the academic community, because its perspective on the relationship between lay and expert beliefs will enhance our understanding of how modern society, and its representatives -- juries -- appraise witness testimony, still the archetypal form of evidence in criminal trials. The result of this research will be disseminated not only in scholarly journals but also in a book addressed to both specialist and lay audiences.