工作记忆按意外程度分配资源,提升语言处理效率。
Strategic resource allocation in memory encoding: An efficiency principle shaping language processing
- 根据信息意外程度动态分配记忆资源,越意外越优先编码
- 意外信息编码更精确,抗遗忘和干扰能力更强
- 适用于理解语言处理中的不确定性与效率机制
人类如何高效利用有限的工作记忆支持语言行为?本文提出‘战略资源分配’(SRA)作为句子加工中记忆编码的效率原则:工作记忆资源会动态且策略性地分配给新颖和意外的信息。从资源理性视角看,该原则是解决工作记忆容量有限与表征噪声双重限制下的优化问题——在资源约束下最小化过去输入的检索误差。其解为对更意外的输入投入更多资源以实现更高精度编码。关键结果表明,意外信息获得增强表征,因而更不易衰减或受干扰。基于自然语料库数据,在依存局部性背景下,生产与理解任务中均发现支持SRA的证据:预测性弱的非局部依存关系表现出较弱的局部性效应。但研究也揭示显著跨语言差异,提示需深入考察这一通用记忆效率原则如何与语言特异的短语结构相互作用。SRA凸显了表征不确定性在记忆编码中的核心作用,并从高效编码角度重新阐释了意外度与熵对加工难度的影响。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
How is the limited capacity of working memory efficiently used to support human linguistic behaviors? In this paper, we propose Strategic Resource Allocation (SRA) as an efficiency principle for memory encoding in sentence processing. The idea is that working memory resources are dynamically and strategically allocated to prioritize novel and unexpected information. From a resource-rational perspective, we argue that SRA is the principled solution to a computational problem posed by two functional assumptions about working memory, namely its limited capacity and its noisy representation. Specifically, working memory needs to minimize the retrieval error of past inputs under the constraint of limited memory resources, an optimization problem whose solution is to allocate more resources to encode more surprising inputs with higher precision. One of the critical consequences of SRA is that surprising inputs are encoded with enhanced representations, and therefore are less susceptible to memory decay and interference. Empirically, through naturalistic corpus data, we find converging evidence for SRA in the context of dependency locality from both production and comprehension, where non-local dependencies with less predictable antecedents are associated with reduced locality effect. However, our results also reveal considerable cross-linguistic variability, suggesting the need for a closer examination of how SRA, as a domain-general memory efficiency principle, interacts with language-specific phrase structures. SRA highlights the critical role of representational uncertainty in understanding memory encoding. It also reimages the effects of surprisal and entropy on processing difficulty from the perspective of efficient memory encoding.
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