Constraints And Developmental Laws Of Associative Memory

Associative memory is the memory of the relationship between things,and it is the memory of multiple items or the relationship between items and their colors,positions and backgrounds.The predecessors put forward the unitization hypothesis around associative memory,that is,semantically related promotes unitization encoding,thus improving the effect of associative memory.On the basis of previous studies,this study attempts to solve two problems:(1)whether the unitization hypothesis can explain the performance of different associative memory phases;(2)Whether semantically related can promote children's associative memory,and what is the tendency of semantically related to promote the development and change of associative memory.Therefore,three experiments were designed in this study.In experiment 1a and experiment 1b,college students were used as subjects to discuss the influence of semantically related on associative memory in encoding and extraction phases.In experiment 2,7-year-old,9-year-old and 11-year-old children were taken as subjects to explore whether semantically related can promote children's associative memory and the inter-age differences in the influence of semantically related on associative memory,so as to solve the development trend of the influence of semantically related on associative memory.Experiment 1a adopt a mixed experimental design of 2(semantic relevance:related,unrelated)×2(attention condition in encoding phases:divided attention,full attention)×3(word of type:old,rearranged,new),in which semantic relevance and word of type is the internal variable of subjects,and attention condition in memory encoding phases is the inter-subject variable.To explore whether semantically related items can promote the subjects' unitization encoding of items,so that their associative memory is less affected by the divided attention in the memory encoding phases.The experimental results show that the recognition scores of semantically unrelated original pairs under the condition of divided attention are lower than those of semantically unrelated original pairs under the condition of full attention,while the recognition scores of semantically related original pairs under the condition of divided attention are not significantly different from those under the condition of full attention.The experimental results show that semantically related items are less affected by the divided attention in encoding phases,and the attention conditions in encoding phases play an important role in the influence of semantic relations between items on associative memory.Experiment 1b investigated the influence of divided attention on the associative memory of different semantically related items in the memory extraction phases,and adopt a mixed experimental design of 2(semantic relevance: related,unrelated)×2(attention conditions in the extraction phases: divided attention,full attention)×3(word of type:old,rearranged,new),in which semantic relevance and word of type is the internal variable of the subjects,and attention conditions in the memory extraction phases are the inter-subjects variables.This paper discusses whether the semantic relationship between items can promote the unitization encoding,so that it is less affected by the divided attention in the memory extraction phases.The experimental results show that the associative memory of semantically related items is better than that of semantically unrelated items,regardless of whether the participants are divided attention in the extraction phases.The experimental results show that the divided attention in the extraction stage does not affect the promotion of semantically related items to associative memory,while the memory extraction phase plays a smaller role in the influence of semantic relations between items on associative memory.Experiment 2 used 7-year-old,9-year-old and 11-year-old subjects as research objects,and adopts a mixed experimental design of 2(semantic relevance: related,unrelated)×3(age: 7,9and 11 years old)×2(word of type:old,rearranged),in which semantic relevance and word of type is an internal variable and age is an inter-variable of subjects.To investigate whether the encoding of different semantically related items has different effects on children's associative memory.The experimental results show that the correct rate of association recognition of semantically related items is better than that of semantically unrelated items.The experimental results show that the semantic relationship between items increases the contribution of familiarity to associative recognition and promotes their associative memory,and there is no significant difference in this promotion among pupils of different ages.To sum up,this study found that semantically related items are less affected by divided attention tasks,and compared with the extraction phases,the attention conditions in memory encoding phases play a more important role in the influence of different semantically related items on associative memory.In addition,semantically related items can promote children's associative memory,and there is no significant difference in this promotion among pupils of different ages.Generally speaking,the research basically supports the viewpoint of unitization hypothesis.