Adaptive memory: Is survival processing special?

Do the operating characteristics of memory continue to bear the imprints of ancestral selection pressures? Previous work in our laboratory has shown that human memory may be specially tuned to retain information processed in terms of its survival relevance. A few seconds of survival processing in an incidental learning context can produce recall levels greater than most, if not all, known encoding procedures. The current experiments further establish the power of survival processing by demonstrating survival processing advantages against an encoding procedure requiring a combination of individual-item and relational processing. Participants were asked to make either survival relevance decisions or pleasantness ratings about words in the same categorized list. Survival processing produced the best recall, despite the fact that pleasantness ratings of words in a categorized list has long been considered a ‘‘gold standard” for enhancing free recall. The results also help to rule out conventional interpretations of the survival advantage that appeal to enhanced relational or categorical processing.

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