Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, 316 Physics Road, East Lansing, MI, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2019 May;47(4):719-737. doi: 10.3758/s13421-019-00895-8.
Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) argued that performance on any memory task reflects the combined influence of both the fixed structure of the memory system and control processes tailored to the specific task. We investigated the role of control processes in governing the temporal contiguity and semantic contiguity effects in free recall-tendencies to organize recall based on proximity in the study list and pre-existing semantic associations. Subjects studied lists that contained four "clusters", each composed of four semantically associated words but presented in random order such that associates were not in adjacent serial positions. Subjects were given either standard free-recall instructions, instructions to focus on order-based associations (i.e., the original order of presentation), or meaning-based associations (i.e., pre-existing semantic relationships). Replicating previous work, lists with strong semantic relationships resulted in a reduced overall temporal contiguity effect when recalled under standard free-recall instructions. However, under meaning-based recall instructions, the temporal contiguity effect was nearly eliminated. Detailed analyses of within-cluster transitions and an order reconstruction task revealed that temporal information was encoded, but control processes prevented it from dominating memory search. These results point to a need for more empirical work exploring how control processes change recall dynamics and for more theoretical work modeling the computational basis of these processes.
阿特金森和希夫林（1968）认为，任何记忆任务的表现都反映了记忆系统的固定结构和针对特定任务定制的控制过程的综合影响。我们研究了控制过程在控制自由回忆中的时间连续性和语义连续性效应中的作用——根据学习列表中的接近程度和预先存在的语义关联来组织回忆的倾向。被试学习包含四个“簇”的列表，每个簇由四个语义相关的单词组成，但以随机顺序呈现，使得联想词不在相邻的序列位置。被试接受标准的自由回忆指令、关注基于顺序的联想（即呈现的原始顺序）的指令或基于意义的联想（即预先存在的语义关系）的指令。与之前的研究结果一致，当按照标准的自由回忆指令进行回忆时，具有较强语义关系的列表会导致整体时间连续性效应降低。然而，在基于意义的回忆指令下，时间连续性效应几乎被消除。对簇内转换和顺序重建任务的详细分析表明，时间信息被编码，但控制过程阻止它主导记忆搜索。这些结果表明需要更多的实证研究来探索控制过程如何改变回忆动态，并需要更多的理论研究来模拟这些过程的计算基础。
