Snyder Kelly A, Blank Michael P, Marsolek Chad J
Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado 80208, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2008 Apr;15(2):315-21. doi: 10.3758/pbr.15.2.315.
Novelty preferences (longer fixations on new stimuli than on previously presented stimuli) are widely used to assess memory in nonverbal populations, such as human infants and experimental animals, yet important questions remain about the nature of the processes that underlie them. We used a classical conditioning paradigm to test whether novelty preferences reflect (1) a stimulus-driven bias toward novelty in visual selective attention or (2) explicit memory for old stimuli. Results indicated that conditioning affected adults' looking behavior in the visual paired comparison, but not their recognition memory judgments. Furthermore, the typically observed novelty preference occurred only when a bias toward novelty had no competition from a bias toward salience due to conditioning. These results suggest that novelty preferences may reflect attentional processes and implicit memory to a greater degree than explicit memory, a finding with important implications for understanding memory in nonverbal populations and the development of memory in humans.
新奇偏好（对新刺激的注视时间长于先前呈现的刺激）被广泛用于评估非语言人群的记忆，如人类婴儿和实验动物，但关于其背后过程的本质仍存在重要问题。我们使用经典条件反射范式来测试新奇偏好是否反映（1）视觉选择性注意中对新奇的刺激驱动偏差，或（2）对旧刺激的显性记忆。结果表明，条件反射影响了成年人在视觉配对比较中的注视行为，但不影响他们的识别记忆判断。此外，通常观察到的新奇偏好仅在由于条件反射而产生的对新奇的偏差没有受到对显著性的偏差竞争时才会出现。这些结果表明，新奇偏好可能在更大程度上反映了注意过程和内隐记忆，而非显性记忆，这一发现对于理解非语言人群的记忆以及人类记忆的发展具有重要意义。
