Testing system-wide principles of memory

在大多数科学研究领域，都有规律和原则作为该领域内研究和理论的基础。然而，在对人类记忆的研究中，没有规律，也没有几个被广泛接受的原则。缺乏法律和原则的一个原因是，记忆不是一个单一的系统。因为每个存储系统按照不同的规则运行，所以不可能发现存储的一般规律或原理。最近，我和我的同事们争辩说，记忆原则确实存在，我们描述了七个原则，这些原则适用于任何潜在的假设记忆系统。拟议研究计划的目标是评估从一般原则得出的新预测，并产生新的原则。我们将从三个方面进行详细研究。(1)在大多数记忆区域中，有区别的项目(即，黑词列表中的一个红色单词)比非有区别的项目更容易记住。基于独特性的原则的一个问题是，当测试利用内隐记忆时，这种效果并不可靠。(2)研究人员已经确定了几个“签名”结果，这些结果表明一个人在某项特定任务中利用了短期记忆。一项关键发现将安静控制条件下的记忆与同时发音(大声地、反复地说出一些不相关的项目，如数字1-5)进行了比较。标准观点认为，同时发音选择性地影响工作记忆的发音控制过程。相反，这项拟议的研究将调查不含语音或发音成分的任务是否具有类似的效果，从而检验提出的次要任务效果的新原理。(3)尽管大多数记忆研究使用语言刺激，但关于非语言记忆，特别是程序性记忆的文献很多(即，知道“如何”而不是知道“那”)。然而，用来研究程序记忆的范式不利于评估拟议的原则是否适用。第三条研究路线将开发出研究程序记忆任务中的原则的范例，然后直接比较每个原则与程序性记忆任务和陈述性记忆任务的适用性。

In most areas of scientific inquiry, there are laws and principles that are the foundation of research and theory within that domain. In the study of human memory, however, there are no laws and few widely-accepted principles. One reason offered for the lack of laws and principles is that memory is not a unitary system. Because each memory system operates according to different rules, discovering general laws or principles of memory is not possible. Recently, my colleagues and I argued that principles of memory do exist and we described seven principles that apply regardless of the underlying hypothetical memory system. The objective of the proposed research program is to evaluate novel predictions derived from the general principles and to generate new principles. Three areas will be examined in detail. (1) In most areas of memory, distinctive items (i.e., a red word in a list of black words) are remembered better than non-distinct items. One problem for a principle based on distinctiveness is that this effect is not reliably observed when tests tap implicit memory. (2) Researchers have identified several 'signature' results that indicate that a person is utilizing short-term memory on a particular task. One key finding compares memory in a quiet control condition to one in which people engage in concurrent articulation (saying some irrelevant items, such as the numbers 1-5, out loud, over and over). The standard view argues that concurrent articulation selectively affects the articulatory control process of working memory. In contrast, the proposed research will investigate whether tasks with no phonological or articulatory component have similar effects, thereby testing a proposed new principle of secondary task effects. (3) Although most memory research uses verbal stimuli, there is a robust literature on non-verbal and especially procedural memory (i.e., knowing "how" as opposed to knowing "that"). The paradigms used to study procedural memory, however, are not conducive to assessing whether the proposed principles apply. The third line of research will develop paradigms for studying principles in tasks thought to tap procedural memory, and will then directly compare the applicability of each principle to procedural and declarative memory tasks.