School of Psychology, University of Newcastle, Australia.
School of Psychology, University of Newcastle, Australia.
Cognition. 2020 Sep;202:104294. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104294. Epub 2020 Jun 3.
It has long been known that cues can be used to improve performance on memory recall tasks. There is evidence to suggest additional cues provide further benefit, presumably by narrowing the search space. Problems that require integration of two or more cues, alternately referred to as memory intersections or multiply constrained memory problems, could be approached using several strategies, namely serial or parallel consideration of cues. The type of strategy implicated is essential information for the development of theories of memory, yet evidence to date has been inconclusive. Using a novel application of the powerful Systems Factorial Technology (Townsend & Nozawa, 1995) we find strong evidence that participants use two cues in parallel in free recall tasks - a finding that contradicts two recent publications in this area. We then provide evidence from a related recognition task showing that while most participants also use a parallel strategy in that paradigm, a reliable subset of participants used a serial strategy. Our findings suggest a theoretically meaningful distinction between participants strategies in recall and recognition based intersection memory tasks, and also highlight the importance of tightly controlled methodological and analytic frameworks to overcome issues of serial/parallel model mimicry.
长期以来，人们已经知道线索可以用来提高记忆回忆任务的表现。有证据表明，额外的线索提供了进一步的好处，大概是通过缩小搜索空间。需要整合两个或多个线索的问题，交替称为记忆交叉或多重约束记忆问题，可以使用几种策略来解决，即线索的串行或并行考虑。所涉及的策略类型对于记忆理论的发展至关重要，但迄今为止的证据尚无定论。使用强大的系统因素技术（Townsend 和 Nozawa，1995）的新应用，我们发现有力的证据表明，参与者在自由回忆任务中并行使用两个线索 - 这一发现与该领域最近的两项出版物相矛盾。然后，我们从一项相关的识别任务中提供证据，表明虽然大多数参与者在该范式中也使用并行策略，但可靠的参与者子集使用串行策略。我们的研究结果表明，在基于交叉记忆任务的回忆和识别中，参与者策略之间存在理论上有意义的区别，并且还强调了严格控制方法和分析框架的重要性，以克服串行/并行模型模拟的问题。
