Liu Zhenliang, Liu Tiantian, Li Yansong
Reward, Competition and Social Neuroscience Lab, Department of Psychology, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China.
Institute for Brain Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2021 Feb;28(1):292-303. doi: 10.3758/s13423-020-01807-7. Epub 2020 Sep 15.
Memory is highly susceptible to distortions, which can exert serious consequences in daily life. Despite this, we still know little about the role of factors that comprise social contexts in which memory processes occur. In the present study, we attempted to address this issue by examining how social competition influences true and false recognition. Participants performed a version of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm designed to lure them into producing both true and false recognition either in competition against or independently of another person. We found that participants in the competition group showed lower levels of true and false recognition than those in the control group. Signal-detection analyses revealed that participants in both groups showed equivalent memory sensitivity for true recognition, while those in the competition group exhibited a decreased sensitivity for false recognition, which implies enhanced item-specific encoding during social competition. Moreover, participants in the competition group showed a more conservative response bias for both true and false recognition at retrieval than those in the control group, indicating a shift towards conservatism in decision strategy for both true and false recognition during social competition. The results provide compelling evidence for a decision-based reduction of true recognition and both encoding-based and decision-based reductions of false recognition under competitive contexts. Therefore, these novel findings may have implications both for understanding the powerful role of social competition on true and false memories and for understanding the potential role of social competition on other aspects of memory processes.
记忆极易受到扭曲，这可能在日常生活中产生严重后果。尽管如此，我们对构成记忆过程发生的社会背景的因素所起的作用仍然知之甚少。在本研究中，我们试图通过考察社会竞争如何影响真实和错误识别来解决这个问题。参与者进行了一个版本的迪ese-罗迪格-麦克德莫特（DRM）范式，该范式旨在诱使他们在与他人竞争或独立于他人的情况下产生真实和错误识别。我们发现，竞争组的参与者在真实和错误识别方面的水平低于对照组。信号检测分析表明，两组参与者在真实识别方面表现出同等的记忆敏感性，而竞争组的参与者在错误识别方面表现出较低的敏感性，这意味着在社会竞争中特定项目编码得到增强。此外，竞争组的参与者在检索时对真实和错误识别都表现出比对照组更保守的反应偏差，表明在社会竞争中真实和错误识别的决策策略都转向了保守主义。这些结果为在竞争背景下基于决策减少真实识别以及基于编码和决策减少错误识别提供了有力证据。因此，这些新发现可能对理解社会竞争对真实和错误记忆的强大作用以及对理解社会竞争在记忆过程其他方面的潜在作用都有启示。
