Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, England.
Psychol Rev. 2012 Apr;119(2):431-40. doi: 10.1037/a0027373. Epub 2012 Feb 13.
Do humans search in memory using dynamic local-to-global search strategies similar to those that animals use to forage between patches in space? If so, do their dynamic memory search policies correspond to optimal foraging strategies seen for spatial foraging? Results from a number of fields suggest these possibilities, including the shared structure of the search problems-searching in patchy environments-and recent evidence supporting a domain-general cognitive search process. To investigate these questions directly, we asked participants to recover from memory as many animal names as they could in 3 min. Memory search was modeled over a representation of the semantic search space generated from the BEAGLE memory model of Jones and Mewhort (2007), via a search process similar to models of associative memory search (e.g., Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1981). We found evidence for local structure (i.e., patches) in memory search and patch depletion preceding dynamic local-to-global transitions between patches. Dynamic models also significantly outperformed nondynamic models. The timing of dynamic local-to-global transitions was consistent with optimal search policies in space, specifically the marginal value theorem (Charnov, 1976), and participants who were more consistent with this policy recalled more items.
人类是否在记忆中使用类似于动物在空间中在斑块之间觅食的动态局部到全局搜索策略来搜索？如果是这样，他们的动态记忆搜索策略是否与空间觅食中看到的最佳觅食策略相对应？许多领域的研究结果表明了这些可能性，包括搜索问题——在斑块环境中搜索——的共享结构，以及支持通用认知搜索过程的最新证据。为了直接研究这些问题，我们要求参与者在 3 分钟内尽可能多地从记忆中恢复动物的名字。通过与联想记忆搜索模型（例如 Raaijmakers & Shiffrin，1981）相似的搜索过程，对 Jones 和 Mewhort（2007）的 BEAGLE 记忆模型生成的语义搜索空间的表示进行了记忆搜索建模。我们发现记忆搜索中存在局部结构（即斑块）的证据，并且在斑块之间的动态局部到全局转变之前存在斑块耗竭。动态模型也明显优于非动态模型。动态局部到全局转变的时间与空间中的最优搜索策略一致，特别是边际价值定理（Charnov，1976），并且更符合该策略的参与者回忆的项目更多。
