Baror Shira, Aminoff Elissa, Kenett Yoed N
The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Suzanne and Charles Goodman Brain Sciences Building, Edmond J. Safra Campus, The Hebrew University, 9190401, Jerusalem, Israel.
Department of Psychology, Fordham University, Bronx, NY, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2024 Dec 2. doi: 10.3758/s13421-024-01672-y.
Spontaneous associative processes (e.g., mind wandering, spontaneous memory recollection) are prevalent in everyday life, yet their influence on perceptual scene memory is under debate. Given that scene perception involves extraction of contextual associations, we hypothesized that associative thought would enhance scene memory by promoting encoding of contextual associations. In an online experiment (N = 75), participants viewed scenes, and following each scene either generated chained-free associations (associative processing), or, as control, listed words that begin with a specific letter (phonological processing). Scene memory was tested after an intermediate creativity task, which is also shown to rely on associative processes. Results revealed that associative thought, regardless of its conceptual (semantic) distances between responses, enhanced scene-gist memory, but hampered memory of scene details, implying that associative thought facilitates contextual encoding. In a follow-up experiment (N = 74), we found that the effect of associative thought on scene-gist memory was mediated by scene labeling. When participants were asked to explicitly label the scene before completing an associative processing or a phonological processing task, scene-gist memory was prioritized at the expense of scene details, eliminating the memory differences between tasks. These findings imply that labeling past perceived scenes, whether explicitly or implicitly during associative thought, facilitates scene-gist memory. Lastly, in both experiments, creativity was not correlated with scene memory but was positively correlated with the semantic distances between scene-based associations, extending past findings that link creativity with the breadth of associative processes. Together, these findings highlight the likely effect of post-perceptual associative processes on higher-order cognitive functions, such as memory consolidation and creative thought.
自发联想过程（如思绪游荡、自发的记忆回想）在日常生活中很常见，但其对感知场景记忆的影响仍存在争议。鉴于场景感知涉及上下文关联的提取，我们假设联想思维会通过促进上下文关联的编码来增强场景记忆。在一项在线实验（N = 75）中，参与者观看场景，在每个场景之后，要么生成无链式联想（联想加工），要么作为对照，列出以特定字母开头的单词（语音加工）。在一个同样依赖联想过程的中间创造力任务之后测试场景记忆。结果显示，无论反应之间的概念（语义）距离如何，联想思维都增强了场景主旨记忆，但妨碍了场景细节的记忆，这意味着联想思维促进了上下文编码。在后续实验（N = 74）中，我们发现联想思维对场景主旨记忆的影响是由场景标记介导的。当要求参与者在完成联想加工或语音加工任务之前明确标记场景时，场景主旨记忆被优先考虑，而以牺牲场景细节为代价，消除了任务之间的记忆差异。这些发现表明，无论是在联想思维过程中明确还是隐含地标记过去感知的场景，都有助于场景主旨记忆。最后，在两个实验中，创造力与场景记忆均无关联，但与基于场景的联想之间的语义距离呈正相关，扩展了过去将创造力与联想过程的广度联系起来的研究结果。总之，这些发现突出了感知后联想过程对高阶认知功能（如记忆巩固和创造性思维）可能产生的影响。
