How Individual Differences in Attention and Memory Relate to Who Remembers What

以自我为中心。自我陶醉。自恋。社交媒体的时代普及了这样一种观念，即人们现在认为自己比其他任何东西都更重要(Sediystes等人，2018年)。由于注意力集中在自己身上，个人可能无法注意、处理和记住周围其他重要的事情。这项拟议的研究将通过将人们亚临床自恋倾向的个体差异与他们的识别记忆联系起来，来量化这一缺陷。在这样做的过程中，我和我的团队将确定人们认识到什么和忘记了什么(项目1)，为什么他们认识到那些特定的事情(项目2)，以及可能改变这一点的因素。人类记忆的基本模型假设了一条链，人们通过这条链感知、处理和记忆特定的刺激而不是其他刺激(Hitch等人，2018年)。虽然突出的目标往往会吸引注意力，但缺乏区别的刺激(例如，名气、个人相关性或其他显著特征)往往不会；因此，人们后来无法识别这些目标。例如，人们往往会注意到并记住与他们自己的车型相同的汽车(布尔乔亚等人，2016)。类似的汽车的自我关联性不仅吸引了人们的注意，而且还有助于将自己的车辆与其他车辆区分开来(比如在拥挤的停车场)。在这里，注意力通过将认知资源定向到特定对象并对其进行编码以供以后使用(将我的钥匙插入正确的车辆)来补充记忆。因此，一件事的相关性和独特性决定了一个人是否成功地记住了它。因此，人们会记住对他们个人很重要的人、地点和物体(Rogers等人，1977)，但也可能记住那些不是特别重要的事情(例如，一只罕见的黑天鹅在一群白鸟中游泳；Hunt，2003)。在这里，我将确定个人基本行为特征(即亚临床自恋)的可变性如何预测人们对事物的识别能力。在试点数据中，我的实验室发现，报告亚临床自恋程度较高的人认出的面孔较少。项目1将确认这一结果，并确定它是否也适用于非社会刺激。然后，项目2将通过测试与认知处理相关的各种因素(例如，努力、分心、视觉-认知差异)来揭示这种缺陷的机制。最后，项目3将询问接受者的动机如何对这些机制做出贡献，同时间接地告知改进策略。这项研究将通过将个体特征差异与记忆的基本功能和过程联系起来，帮助阐述关于思维和人类行为的基本知识。通过这样做，这项工作将产生更丰富的理解，了解个体在记住什么、为什么记住、何时记住，以及这可能如何根据一个人的性格基本要素而变化。

Egocentric. Self-absorbed. Narcissistic. The age of social media has popularized the idea that people now think of themselves more than anything else (Sedikides et al., 2018). With attention anchored on themselves, individuals may fail to notice, process, and remember other important things around them. The proposed research will quantify this deficit by relating individual differences in people's subclinical narcissistic tendencies to their recognition memory. In doing so, my team and I will identify what people recognize versus forget (Project 1), why they recognize those particular things (Project 2), and factors that might alter this. Foundational models of human memory posit a chain through which people perceive, process, and remember particular stimuli over others (Hitch et al., 2018). Whereas salient targets tend to captivate attention, stimuli that lack distinctions (e.g., fame, personal relevance, or otherwise remarkable features) often do not; people thus fail to recognize such targets later. For example, people tend to notice and remember cars of the same model as their own (Bourgeois et al., 2016). The similar car's self-relevance not only captures attention but serves the important purpose of helping to distinguish one's own vehicle from those of others (as in a crowded parking lot). Here, attention feeds memory by orienting cognitive resources to a particular object and encoding it for later use (inserting my key into the right vehicle). A thing's relevance and its distinctiveness thus collaborate to determine whether one successfully remembers it. People consequently remember people, places, and objects that matter to them personally (Rogers et al., 1977) but may also remember things that do not particularly matter if they stand out (e.g., a rare black swan swimming among a flock of white birds; Hunt, 2003). Here, I will determine how variability in individuals' basic behavioural traits (i.e., subclinical narcissism) predicts how well people recognize things. In pilot data, my lab found that individuals reporting higher levels of subclinical narcissism recognize fewer faces. Project 1 will confirm this result and establish whether it also applies to nonsocial stimuli. Project 2 will then exhume the mechanisms of this deficit by testing how various factors related to cognitive processing might explain it (e.g., effort, distraction, visual-cognitive differences). Finally, Project 3 will interrogate how perceivers' motivations contribute to those mechanisms while indirectly informing ameliorative tactics. This research will help to expound upon fundamental knowledge of the mind and human behaviour by relating individual trait differences to the basic functions and processes of memory. In doing so, the work will yield a richer understanding of how individuals vary in what they remember, why they remember, when they remember, and how this may vary according to basic elements of one's character.