Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2012 Jan;38(1):218-28. doi: 10.1037/a0025161. Epub 2011 Aug 22.
What are the mechanisms underlying search in social memory (e.g., remembering the people one knows)? Do the search mechanisms involve dynamic local-to-global transitions similar to semantic search, and are these transitions governed by the general control of attention, associated with working memory span? To find out, we asked participants to recall individuals from their personal social networks and measured each participant's working memory capacity. Additionally, participants provided social-category and contact-frequency information about the recalled individuals as well as information about the social proximity among the recalled individuals. On the basis of these data, we tested various computational models of memory search regarding their ability to account for the patterns in which participants recalled from social memory. Although recall patterns showed clustering based on social categories, models assuming dynamic transitions between representations cued by social proximity and frequency information predicted participants' recall patterns best-no additional explanatory power was gained from social-category information. Moreover, individual differences in the time between transitions were positively correlated with differences in working memory capacity. These results highlight the role of social proximity in structuring social memory and elucidate the role of working memory for maintaining search criteria during search within that structure.
在社会记忆（例如，记住认识的人）中，搜索的机制是什么？搜索机制是否涉及类似于语义搜索的动态局部到全局的转变，并且这些转变是否受到与工作记忆广度相关的注意力的一般控制的影响？为了找出答案，我们要求参与者回忆他们个人社交网络中的人，并测量每个参与者的工作记忆容量。此外，参与者还提供了关于被回忆起的个体的社会类别和联系频率信息，以及关于被回忆起的个体之间社会接近度的信息。基于这些数据，我们测试了记忆搜索的各种计算模型，以评估它们解释参与者从社会记忆中回忆的模式的能力。尽管回忆模式基于社会类别表现出聚类，但假设由社会接近度和频率信息提示的表示之间的动态转变的模型最好地预测了参与者的回忆模式-没有从社会类别信息中获得额外的解释力。此外，转变之间的个体差异时间与工作记忆容量的差异呈正相关。这些结果突出了社会接近度在构建社会记忆中的作用，并阐明了工作记忆在维持搜索标准方面的作用，这些标准在该结构内进行搜索。
