Human attention and memory

遗忘通常被认为是记忆的失败。 我们哀叹放错地方的物品，错过的约会，以及无法立即想起的过去经历。 丹尼尔·沙克特（Daniel Schacter）在他的畅销心理学著作中将遗忘的短暂性描述为“记忆的七宗罪”之一。“但遗忘并不总是记忆的失败。 相反，遗忘往往是为了记忆。 通过删除不相关、不正确或过时的信息，有意遗忘使我们能够将有限的认知资源集中在相关、正确和当前的信息上。虽然我们确实试图限制对要被遗忘的信息的编码和提取，但我们并不是通过简单地衰减项目表征或其记忆痕迹来实现这一点的。 相反，我们使用积极的注意力机制来限制输入和输出干扰被遗忘的信息。 我的工作目标是探索这些注意机制的本质，并确定它们如何促进遗忘。 我特别感兴趣的是注意力抑制在防止将被遗忘的信息存储在长期记忆中的作用。通过对健康的人类志愿者采用认知行为方法，我的研究将产生关于遗忘的意图如何在行为中体现的知识。 这是一个独特的视角，因为它不是只关注注意力如何在记忆中运作的问题，而是解决了同样重要的问题，即注意力如何在遗忘中运作。 特别是考虑到遗忘困难与一般记忆障碍以及一些临床障碍有关，这一知识将有助于建立正常和受损记忆功能的认知模型。

Forgetting is often viewed as a failure of memory.  We lament misplaced items, missed appointments, and past experiences that cannot be brought immediately to mind.  In his popular psychology book, Daniel Schacter describes the transience that characterizes forgetting as one of the "seven sins of memory."  But forgetting is not always a failure of memory.  Instead, forgetting often works in the service of memory.  By expunging irrelevant, incorrect, or outdated information, intentional forgetting enables us to focus our limited cognitive resources on relevant, correct, and current information. While it is true that we attempt to limit the encoding and retrieval of to-be-forgotten information, we do not achieve this through simple decay of the item representations or their memory traces.  Instead, we use active attentional mechanisms to limit input and output interference from to-be-forgotten information.  The goal of my work is to explore the nature of these attentional mechanisms and to determine how they subserve forgetting.  I am especially interested in the role that attentional inhibition plays in preventing to-be-forgotten information from being stored in long term memory. By employing cognitive behavioural methods with healthy human volunteers, my research will generate knowledge about how the intention to forget is instantiated in behaviour.  This is a unique perspective because rather than focusing exclusively on the question of how attention operates in the service of remembering, it addresses the equally important issue of how attention operates in the service of forgetting.  Especially given the fact that difficulties in forgetting are implicated in general memory impairments as well as in some clinical disorders, this knowledge will contribute to cognitive models of normal as well as impaired memory function.