Purposeful memory: Influences on how we remember and forget

我们接触到的信息量越来越大，超出了我们可能会记住的范围。我们怎么知道，当我们第一次遇到信息时，我们是否会在以后记住它--甚至我们是否应该记住它？我提议的研究计划的长期目标是更好地了解人们对自己有目的地记忆和遗忘的能力的控制程度和意识。在对记忆控制过程的考察中，我的研究项目将重点放在人们如何努力不学习不重要的信息：忘记。在定向遗忘范式中，参与者学习信息，并被提示记住该信息的某些部分，但忘记其他部分，记忆测试通常显示，要记住的部分表现更好。在日常生活中，我们有相当多的选择，可以选择是关注和编码，还是忽视和忘记我们遇到的信息。然而，选择对我们有意忘记信息能力的影响还没有被研究过。研究表明，当个人选择他们想要学习的东西时，尊重这些选择会比不尊重这些选择会带来更好的记忆表现。在我提出的研究中，学习者在学习阶段之前选择要记住或忘记的项目。在学习过程中，他们的选择有的会得到尊重，有的会被不尊重。目的是研究选择信息是如何影响有意遗忘的。与此相关的是，我们使用原始信息来决定记住某件事有多重要。我将进一步探讨我们如何使用来源可靠性来改变我们记忆或忘记信息的策略。我的研究还将考察情绪如何影响记忆的意识和控制。人们相信并预测，情绪性信息(例如，讲述犯罪或庆祝活动)将比中性信息更容易被记住，但实际上它是否会被更好地记住取决于许多不同因素的相互作用，包括测试类型、刺激类型(例如，文字与图片)和特定的学习清单背景。学习者能否意识到影响他们对情感内容记忆的因素，以便做出准确的记忆预测？我们的目标是考察材料的情感内容和整体学习环境对我们准确预测记忆表现的能力的影响程度，并探索我们如何使用这些预测来控制学习过程，以优化记忆。我提出的继续我的研究计划将有助于我们理解我们如何能够控制编码，以及监控和控制如何受到情绪的影响。理解什么时候监控是精确的，什么时候我们可以成功地控制编码，对于理解有目的地使用记忆是必不可少的。这项研究最终将有助于我们对记忆的总体概念。

We are increasingly exposed to larger amounts of information than we could possibly be expected to remember. How can we know, when we first encounter information, whether we will remember it later-or even whether we should? The long-term goal of my proposed research program is to gain a greater understanding of the extent to which people have control over and awareness of their ability to remember and forget purposefully. In the examination of memory control processes, my research program will focus on how people try to not learn information that is unimportant: to forget. In the directed forgetting paradigm, participants study information and are cued to remember some portions of that information but to forget other portions, with memory tests generally showing better performance for the to-be-remembered portion. In everyday life, we have substantial choice in whether to attend to and encode or to disregard and forget the information that we encounter. Yet the influence of choice in our ability to intentionally forget information has not been studied. Studies have shown that when individuals choose what they would like to study, honouring these choices leads to better memory performance than does dishonouring these choices. In my proposed studies, learners choose items to remember or to forget prior to a study phase. During study, some of their choices will be honoured, and some will be dishonoured. The goal is to examine how choosing information affects intentional forgetting. Relatedly, we use source information to decide how important it is to remember something. I will further explore how we use source reliability to change our strategies for remembering or forgetting information. My research will also examine how emotion influences memory awareness and control. People believe and predict that emotional information (e.g., recounting a crime or celebration) will be remembered better than neutral information, but whether it is actually remembered better depends on the interaction of a number of different factors, including the type of test, the type of stimuli (e.g., words vs. pictures) and the specific study list context. Can learners appreciate the factors that influence their memory for emotional content in order to make accurate memory predictions? The goal is to examine the extent to which the emotional content of material and overall study context influence our ability to accurately predict memory performance, and to explore how we use these predictions to control study processes in service of optimizing memory. The proposed continuation of my research program will contribute to our understanding of how we are able to control encoding and how both monitoring and control are influenced by emotion. Understanding when monitoring is precise and when we can successfully control encoding are essential to understanding the purposeful use of memory. This research will ultimately contribute to our conception of memory in general.