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

以自我为中心。自私的。自恋。社交媒体时代普及了这样一种观点，即人们现在认为自己比其他任何东西都重要（Sedikides et al., 2018）。由于注意力集中在自己身上，个体可能无法注意、处理和记住周围其他重要的事情。拟议的研究将通过将人们的亚临床自恋倾向与他们的识别记忆的个体差异联系起来，来量化这种缺陷。在此过程中，我和我的团队将确定人们认识到的和忘记的东西（项目1），为什么他们认识到这些特定的东西（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个链条，人们通过它来感知、处理和记住特定的刺激（Hitch et al., 2018）。然而显著的目标往往会吸引注意力，缺乏区别的刺激（例如，名声，个人相关性，或其他显著特征）往往不会吸引注意力；因此，人们后来无法识别这些目标。例如，人们倾向于注意并记住与自己相同型号的汽车（Bourgeois et al., 2016）。相似车的自我关联不仅能吸引注意力，还能起到重要的作用，帮助人们将自己的车与他人的车区分开来（比如在拥挤的停车场里）。在这里，注意力通过将认知资源导向特定对象并将其编码以供以后使用（将我的钥匙插入正确的车辆中）来喂养记忆。因此，一件事的相关性和独特性共同决定了一个人是否能成功地记住它。因此，人们会记住对他们个人来说重要的人、地点和物品（Rogers et al., 1977），但也可能会记住那些不特别重要的事情，如果它们很突出（例如，一只罕见的黑天鹅在一群白鸟中游泳；Hunt, 2003）。在这里，我将确定个体基本行为特征（即亚临床自恋）的可变性如何预测人们对事物的认知程度。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更少。项目1将证实这一结果，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如何解释这种缺陷（例如，努力、分心、视觉认知差异）来挖掘这种缺陷的机制。最后，项目3将询问感知者的动机如何促进这些机制，同时间接地告知改进策略。通过将个体特征差异与记忆的基本功能和过程联系起来，这项研究将有助于阐明关于心智和人类行为的基本知识。在此过程中，这项工作将使人们更丰富地了解个体在记忆内容、记忆原因、记忆时间方面的差异，以及这些如何根据一个人性格的基本要素而变化。

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.