Durable Change in Implicit Cognition through Retrieval-Based Memory Modification

该奖项是作为NSF社会、行为和经济学博士后研究奖学金(SPRF)计划的一部分提供的。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界、工业界或私营部门和政府的科学职业生涯培养有前途的、早期职业博士水平的科学家。SPRF奖项包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行两年的培训，并鼓励博士后研究员进行独立研究。国家科学基金会致力于促进科学界所有阶层的科学家参与其研究方案和活动，包括那些来自代表性不足的群体的科学家；博士后阶段被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的一个重要水平。每一位博士后研究员必须解决推动各自学科领域发展的重要科学问题。这一博士后奖学金奖项支持一位正在崛起的学者研究对个人和群体的隐性(即相对自动的)反应的形成和变化。该项目将利用社会心理学、神经科学和动物研究中关于记忆更新的研究，以促进对内隐社会印象如何有效和持久地修正的科学理解。尽管许多人持有明确的(即自我报告的)平等和宽容的信念，但隐性的认知测量揭示了对被污名化或边缘化群体的负面印象，例如基于种族、族裔、年龄、性别和性取向的群体。这些隐含的反应可能会对社会许多领域的决策和人际关系产生各种后果，但如何可靠地改变它们还没有得到很好的理解。这个项目试图通过测试各种方法来填补这一空白，通过这些方法，关于其他人和群体的现有记忆可以被重新激活和修改，以纳入新的信息，并变得更符合明确的信念。尽管对具有社会意义的群体的内隐反应通常很难修改，但最近基于记忆提取的更新和重新巩固的研究表明，在学习旨在修改这些反应的新信息之前，通过提取构成这些反应的记忆，可以持久地改变认知和情感反应。在使用不同方法和目标群体的一系列研究中，该项目将测试识别和提取支持负面群体印象的记忆在调节旨在改变这些内隐反应的干预措施的成功方面的关键作用。新的社会目标(个人和群体)将与各种类型的初始学习一起呈现，包括评价性条件反射、行为描述和一般的群体信息，以允许测试后续记忆提取和新学习的有效性，以修改与社会目标的不同经历后的初始内隐反应。使用新颖和真实的群体目标，该项目还将评估不同类型的新学习对记忆提取后产生持久记忆的影响，包括：仅仅重新呈现目标(S)，重新定义特定事件记忆的含义，将参与者对群体的想法与参与者的个人经验联系起来，以及呈现新的事实群体信息。该项目的另一个目标将是测试产生最有效修改的记忆重新激活片段的特征，包括检查重新激活的记忆的类型。特别是，记忆重新激活期间的预期违规被理论认为是使记忆更新发生的核心重要因素。这个项目的研究将考察预期违反在更新记忆表征中的作用，这些表征有助于内隐印象，这样做将扩展和建立记忆更新理论。研究结果的概括性将通过使用社区和在线样本来促进，并将结果用于开发内隐记忆变化的计算模型，以了解内隐认知在基本学习和记忆过程中的变化。

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields.This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising scholar investigating the formation and change of implicit (i.e., relatively automatic) reactions to people and groups. The project will utilize research across work in social psychology, neuroscience, and animal research on memory updating to advance scientific understanding of how implicit social impressions can be effectively and durably revised. Although many people hold explicitly (i.e., self-reported) egalitarian and tolerant beliefs, implicit measures of cognition have revealed far more negative impressions of stigmatized or marginalized groups, such as those based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, and sexuality. These implicit reactions can have a variety of consequences for decision-making and interpersonal relations in many areas of society, but the ways in which they can be reliably changed are not well understood. This project seeks to fill that gap by testing various methods through which existing memories about other people and groups can be reactivated and revised to incorporate new information and become more consistent with explicit beliefs.Although implicit reactions to socially meaningful groups often have been difficult to revise, recent work on memory retrieval-based updating and reconsolidation has shown that cognitive and affective reactions can be durably altered by retrieval of the memories that underlie those reactions prior to learning new information aimed at revising them. In a series of studies employing diverse methods and target groups, this project will test the critical role of identification and retrieval of memories that support negative group impressions in moderating the success of interventions aimed at changing those implicit reactions. Novel social targets (individuals and groups) will be presented in conjunction with various types of initial learning, including evaluative conditioning, behavioral descriptions, and general group information, to allow a test of the effectiveness of subsequent memory retrieval and new learning for modifying initial implicit reactions following diverse experiences with the social targets. Using novel and real group targets, the project will also assess the impact of different types of new learning on producing durable revision after memory retrieval, including: mere re-presentation of the target(s), reframing the meaning of specific event memories, connecting participant thoughts about groups to the personal experiences of the participant, and presentation of new factual group information. A further goal of the project will be to test the characteristics of the memory reactivation episode that produces the most effective revision, including an examination of the type of memory that is reactivated. In particular, expectancy violation during memory reactivation has been theorized to be of central importance in enabling memory updating to occur. Studies in this project will examine the role of expectancy violation in the updating of the memory representations that contribute to implicit impressions and in so doing will extend and build upon memory updating theory. The generalizability of the results will be promoted through the use of community and online samples, and the results will be used to develop computational models of implicit memory change to understand shifts in implicit cognition in terms of basic processes of learning and memory.