Testing the generality of the specificity principle 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，记忆的原则确实存在，我们描述了七个我们认为适用的原则，无论潜在的假设记忆系统是什么。这项提案中概述的研究目标是评估从一般原则之一--特定性原则--衍生出来的新预测。特殊性原则指出，那些需要检索独特信息、单一事件或特定物品的任务比那些可以使用一般信息或基于要点的信息完成的任务更容易受到干扰，或者更有可能导致性能下降。科学的方法将是改变特定任务探测的信息的特殊性，并表明该任务旨在选择性地询问的是该变量，而不是记忆系统，这是性能的关键决定因素。年轻人和老年人将接受包括回忆、识别、词干补全、字形线索回忆和生成/阅读操作在内的任务的测试。这项研究计划的长期目标是测试原则框架，因为它与特殊性原则有关。短期目标包括：1)测试跨多个任务的专一性；2)通过预测各种任务中年龄和刺激效应的交互作用来测试专一性；3)检查分心对从记忆中提取的信息的影响。研究计划的首要目标是继续检验原则方法的局限性，并尽可能通过设计实验来避免确认偏差，从而使原则有可能不被确认。 拟议的研究计划将在一个单一的原则下整合看似不同的发现，并将为如何描述记忆的根本辩论提供证据：记忆是遵循不同规则的系统的集合，还是根据手头任务的不同而不同的各种过程。此外，这些数据将支持或驳斥年龄相关记忆表现差异的一般缺陷解释。

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 have argued that principles of memory do exist and we described seven principles that we argued apply regardless of the underlying hypothetical memory system. The objective of research outlined in this proposal is to evaluate novel predictions derived from one of the general principles; the specificity principle. The specificity principle states that those tasks that require the retrieval of a unique piece of information, a single event, or a specific item, are more vulnerable to interference or more likely to result in reduced performance than those tasks that can be completed using generic or gist-based information. The scientific approach will be to vary the specificity of the information being probed by a particular task and show that it is that variable, not the memory system the task is meant to selectively query, that is the critical determinant of performance. Younger and older adults will be tested on tasks including recall, recognition, stem completion, graphemic cued recall, and generate/read manipulations. The long-term goal of this program of research is to test the principles framework as it pertains to the specificity principle. The short term goals include 1) examining specificity across multiple tasks; 2) testing specificity by predicting the interaction of age and stimulus effects in a variety of tasks; and 3) examining effects of distraction on the information retrieved from memory. The overarching aims of the research program are to continue to test the limits of the principles approach and, whenever possible, to avoid confirmation bias by designing experiments in such a way that it is possible to disconfirm the principle. The proposed program of research will consolidate seemingly diverse findings under a single principle and will add evidence to the fundamental debate on how to characterize memory: as a collection of systems that follow different rules or as a variety of processes that differ depending on the task at hand. In addition, the data will support or refute a general deficit explanation of age-related differences in memory performance.