Department of Psychology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 603 E Daniel St, Champaign, IL, 61820, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2023 Oct;51(7):1511-1526. doi: 10.3758/s13421-023-01409-3. Epub 2023 Jul 11.
Little is understood about how people strategically process and remember important but complex information, such as sentences. In the current study, we asked whether people can effectively prioritize memory for sentences as a function of their relative importance (operationalized as a reward point value) and whether they do so, in part, by changing their sentence processing strategies when value information is available in advance. We adapted the value-directed remembering paradigm (Castel, Psychol Learn Motiv 48:225-270, 2007) for sentences that varied in constraint and predictability. Each sentence was associated with a high or low value for subsequent free recall (whole sentence) and recognition (sentence-final words) tests. Value information appeared after or before each sentence as a between-subject manipulation. Regardless of condition, we observed that high-value sentences were recalled more often than low-value sentences, showing that people can strategically prioritize their encoding of sentences. However, memory patterns differed depending on when value information was available. Recall for high-value sentences that ended unexpectedly (and therefore violated one's predictions) was reduced in the Before compared to the After condition. Before condition participants also showed a greater tendency to false alarm to lures (words that were the predicted - but not obtained - ending) from strongly constraining sentences. These observations suggest that when people try to prioritize sentence-level information that they know is valuable, the reading strategies they employ may paradoxically lead to worse memory.
人们对于如何策略性地处理和记住重要但复杂的信息（例如句子）知之甚少。在当前的研究中，我们想知道人们是否可以根据句子的相对重要性（通过奖励点数值来操作）有效地优先考虑对句子的记忆，以及他们是否会在预先提供价值信息的情况下通过改变句子处理策略来实现这一点。我们改编了价值导向记忆范式（Castel，Psychol Learn Motiv 48:225-270，2007），用于处理约束性和可预测性不同的句子。每个句子都与后续自由回忆（整句）和识别（句子结尾单词）测试的高或低值相关联。价值信息作为被试间的操纵在每个句子之后或之前出现。无论条件如何，我们观察到高价值句子的回忆频率都高于低价值句子，这表明人们可以策略性地优先考虑对句子的编码。然而，记忆模式取决于价值信息何时可用。在 Before 条件下，出乎意料地结束的高价值句子（因此违反了人们的预测）的回忆减少了，而在 After 条件下则没有。在 Before 条件下的参与者对来自强约束句子的诱饵（即预测但未获得的结尾单词）也表现出更大的错误警报倾向。这些观察结果表明，当人们试图优先处理他们知道有价值的句子级信息时，他们所采用的阅读策略可能会导致记忆更差。
