Nailah B. Horne |
Name: Nailah B. Horne
School: The University of Mississippi Major: Psychology Mentor: Dr. Matthew Reysen Expected Graduation Date: May 2009 Organizations & Honors:
|
ABSTRACT
Adaptive Memory: An Analysis of Survival Processing
| Nairne and colleagues (2007) proposed that human memory systems are "tuned" to remember information that is processed for survival. In their research they discovered a striking phenomenon: words rated for relevance to a foreign grassland survival scenario were recalled at higher levels than identical words encoded under other widely-accepted processing conditions (Weinstein, Bugg, & Roediger, 2008). Nairne et al. believed this phenomenon was due to fitness advantages accrued in the ancestral past. The current study further explores the survival advantage by testing it against two new processing conditions; a burglar condition- which matched the survival task in danger level and in the immediacy of threat, and an unconscious friend scenario- which match in danger level, but did not involve an immediacy of threat. This study found that participants in the burglar condition remember just as many words as the survival condition, while recall in relevance to saving an unconscious friend performed the poorest. These findings provide additional evidence that supports a survival advantage, and also demonstrates how the survival advantage can be extended to different scenarios. |