Congruity effects between materials and processing tasks in the survival processing paradigm (original) (raw)

Adaptive Memory: The Evolutionary Significance of Survival Processing

Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2016

A few seconds of survival processing, during which people assess the relevance of information to a survival situation, produces particularly good retention. One interpretation of this benefit is that our memory systems are optimized to process and retain fitness-relevant information. Such a "tuning" may exist, in part, because our memory systems were shaped by natural selection, using a fitness-based criterion. However, recent research suggests that traditional mnemonic processes, such as elaborative processing, may play an important role in producing the empirical benefit. Boundary conditions have been demonstrated as well, leading some to dismiss evolutionary interpretations of the phenomenon. In this article, we discuss the current state of the evolutionary account and provide a general framework for evaluating evolutionary and purportedly nonevolutionary interpretations of mnemonic phenomena. We suggest that survival processing effects are best viewed within the contex...

The Comparative Value of Survival Processing

2008

We recently proposed that human memory systems are ‘‘tuned’’ to remember information that is processed for survival, perhaps as a result of fitness advantages accrued in the ancestral past. This proposal was supported by experiments in which participants showed superior memory when words were rated for survival relevance, at least relative to when words received other forms of deep processing. The current experiments tested the mettle of survival memory by pitting survival processing against conditions that are universally accepted as producing excellent retention, including conditions in which participants rated words for imagery, pleasantness, and self-reference; participants also generated words, studied words with the intention of learning them, or rated words for relevance to a contextually rich (but non-survival-related) scenario. Survival processing yielded the best retention, which suggests that it may be one of the best encoding procedures yet discovered in the memory field...