Fenneman Achiel, Malamut Sarah T, Sanfey Alan G
Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria.
INVEST Research Flagship, Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Finland.
Cogn Psychol. 2025 Jul;159:101744. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2025.101744. Epub 2025 Jun 9.
We can guide our decisions in novel situations by drawing on our past experiences (episodic memories). While at times we can retrieve relevant episodes via cued recall, other situations may require a process of memory search. But what mechanisms underlie this search? In this work we synthesize six key principles concerning the storage and retrieval of episodic memories, and build on these principles to propose a cognitive mechanism which allows for the retrieval of relevant past experiences through a process of cascading recall. In this process, observing a stimulus triggers the cued recall of a past event. If this memory does not provide sufficient information to warrant a decision, then it next reinstates all the memory's constituent features. These features then form the inputs to sample an additional memory in a subsequent recall step, which in turn reinstates its own features and so forth. This process continues until a suitable past experience is retrieved. We provide empirical support for key predictions of this cascading process through three online experiments in which participants interacted with unfamiliar stimuli. The results indicate that participants rely on cued recall of similar past experiences (experiment 1), and on indirectly related experiences when cued recall is not informative (experiment 2). Additionally, participants were substantially more likely to retrieve a predicted memory, and did so faster, when relying on cued recall versus cascadizng memory search (experiment 3). We conclude by discussing how this cascading recall process bridges several influential models of memory-based decision-making, as well as offering promising directions for future research.
我们可以通过借鉴过去的经历（情景记忆）来指导我们在新情况下的决策。虽然有时我们可以通过线索回忆检索相关的情景，但其他情况可能需要进行记忆搜索。但是这种搜索背后的机制是什么呢？在这项工作中，我们综合了关于情景记忆存储和检索的六个关键原则，并在此基础上提出了一种认知机制，该机制允许通过级联回忆过程检索相关的过去经历。在这个过程中，观察一个刺激会触发对过去事件的线索回忆。如果这个记忆没有提供足够的信息来做出决策，那么它接下来会恢复该记忆的所有组成特征。这些特征随后形成输入，以便在后续的回忆步骤中对另一个记忆进行采样，而这个记忆又会恢复其自身的特征，依此类推。这个过程会持续下去，直到检索到合适的过去经历。我们通过三个在线实验为这个级联过程的关键预测提供了实证支持，在这些实验中参与者与不熟悉的刺激进行交互。结果表明，参与者依赖于对类似过去经历的线索回忆（实验1），并且在线索回忆没有信息量时依赖于间接相关的经历（实验2）。此外，与级联记忆搜索相比，参与者在依赖线索回忆时，更有可能检索到预测的记忆，而且速度更快（实验3）。我们通过讨论这种级联回忆过程如何架起几种有影响力的基于记忆的决策模型之间的桥梁，以及为未来研究提供有前景的方向来得出结论。
