Home > Memory > Think like a Makeshift MacGyver rather than a Negative Nancy: Exploring the Influences of the Survival-Processing Memory Advantage

Think like a Makeshift MacGyver rather than a Negative Nancy: Exploring the Influences of the Survival-Processing Memory Advantage

Imagine that your plane has crashed into the ocean, and you are forced to swim to a deserted island located hundreds of miles away from civilization. All your luggage and the plane’s survival kit have sunk to the bottom of the ocean, and you only have the clothes on your back and the few knickknacks in your pockets. As you sit on the beach exhausted and anxious for a future rescue, you begin to fear that you won’t survive.

island

Don’t worry! The unfortunate LOST-like situation described above is just an example of the kind of scenario that participants are asked to imagine during the survival-processing paradigm task, which is used to observe some of the complex and adaptive functions of memory. During the task, half of the participants are asked to imagine themselves in a survival type situation like the described plane crash whereas the other half are asked to imagine themselves in a non-survival based situation like moving to a foreign land. While envisioning, all participants are given a list of items that they must rate based on how useful they would be in the scenario. Afterwards, a surprise recall test is administered, asking participants to write down all the list items they can remember. The results of this experiment uncover a survival-processing memory advantage in which individuals who imagined themselves in the survival situation recall more items compared to individuals who imagined themselves in a situation unrelated to survival. Although these results are consistent with the adaptive function of memory, researchers haven’t discovered why this advantage occurs, which has motivated the research of Bell, Röer, and Buchner (2013) to reveal the underlying mechanisms responsible for this relationship between memory and survival processing.

Bell et al. (2013) suggested that a possible cause of the survival-processing memory advantage is that the context in which information is presented affects how rich the individual encodes. Encoding is the first step in memory formation and consists of perceiving, recognizing, and processing sensory stimuli to create a mental construct that can be stored for later retrieval. Therefore, the characteristics of the different scenarios imagined by participants in the experiment may have had an influence on how well and how much in detail the list items were encoded. For example, the researchers believed that the negativity effect and mortality salience could be responsible for the survival-processing memory advantage. When imagining a situation in which one must fight for survival, the context can induce strong negative emotional and physiological reactions like stress. This arousal could lead to better recall of the list words compared to a less stressful scenario. Furthermore, mortality salience could also be an influence because past research has demonstrated that thinking about one’s own death before encoding leads to better recall. Therefore, a survival scenario may induce an person to think that there is a possibility that they may die, resulting in better recall of the list items.

Papercllip_Fishhook

On the other hand, the researchers also suggested a third possible cause for the survival-processing memory advantage that didn’t involve what emotions or negative thoughts were induced. Instead, the third possible cause is that individuals who imagined a survival scenario thought about the fitness-enhancing effects of the items on the list unlike the non-survival imagining individuals. For example, when asked to imagine themselves on a deserted island and given a list including the word paperclip, individuals will better recall paperclip than the individuals imagining themselves moving to a foreign land. This is because the deserted island individuals are more detailed in their encoding of the word because they try to think of many  functions of a paperclip such as a fishhook to help them survive. The individuals that imagine themselves moving do not encode as richly and instead think of the paperclip as a normal, insignificant item. To determine which possible cause was responsible for the survival-processing memory advantage, Bell et al. (2013) conducted three experiments, each based on the original paradigm.

In the first experiment, the participants were divided into four different conditions with distinct instructions. The survival condition asked participants to imagine being stranded in unfamiliar grasslands whereas the moving condition asked them to imagine moving to a foreign country. The additional suicide condition asked participants to imagine being in a space capsule, but the oxygen is dwindling, causing the participant to decide to take their own life. In all scenario conditions, the participants were given a list of words to rate based on how useful they would be in the particular situation. The fourth condition did not include a scenario, but instead asked participants to rate how pleasant the thirty items were. In all conditions, a surprise recall test was administered. The researchers expected that if the negativity effect and mortality salience were strong influences in the memory advantage, the suicide condition would have better recall over other conditions because it was the most stressful and death salient condition.

Overall, the results of this experiment revealed that participants in the survival condition recalled the most words compared to all other conditions. The suicide condition did not possess a recall advantage over the other conditions, suggesting that neither the negativity effect nor mortality salience is responsible for the survival-processing memory advantage. The second experiment also came to the same conclusion. The procedure was the same as the first experiment, but the task relevance of the words on the list was manipulated. In particular, the list included 15 survival-relevant words, 15 suicide-relevant words, and 15 irrelevant words. The researchers found that once again, the recall of words was higher in the survival condition compared to all other conditions despite certain words being more consistent with other conditions. Therefore, this experiment provided more evidence that the memory advantage cannot be due to mortality salience and the negativity effect, and the best possible cause of the advantage is thinking in detail about how the item can help one survive.

The final experiment of Bell et al. (2013) directly asked half of the participants to judge a list of items based on whether they were relevant to survival whereas the other half rated the items according to their relevance to death. The list of items was divided into concrete words (e.g., finger, razor, and apple) and abstract words (e.g., moment, courage, and spirit). Similar to the other experiments, a surprise recall test was administered. The researchers hypothesized that if a survival context was necessary for the memory advantage compared to mortality salience or the negativity effect, the participants in the survival-rating condition would have better recall of the items than the participants in the death-rating condition. Also, they expected that if the detailed thoughts of the different uses of an item were a cause of the memory advantage, the recall for concrete words should be higher compared to abstract words because the concrete words represent real, tangible objects with multiple functions.

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The results of the final experiment matched the researcher’s predictions. Recall was greater when the participants were asked to rate the words according to their relevance to survival compared to their relevance to death. Also, concrete words were recalled more often than abstract words, which suggests that how richly one encodes a word can lead to better future retrieval.

In conclusion, Bell et al. (2013) conducted three experiments that each support that the survival-processing memory advantage is not an effect of the negativity effect nor mortality salience. The best possible cause is related to how richly the items are encoded and all the thoughts about how the item could conceivably enhance the chance of survival. Therefore, this study provides additional evidence that memory is adaptive. For example, during evolution, humans have developed techniques in order to have better recall, increasing their ability to live long and reproduce under harsh conditions. The results of the current study support that one of those techniques is to think analytically about how an object can be used in a survival situation outside of its normal function instead of thinking of impending death. Overall, human cognitive processes are dynamic and have been molded to be advantageous towards survival. This research is only just a tiny representation of how memory and evolution are connected, and there is limitless future research needed to understand the complex relationship between the two.

Bell, R., Röer, J. P., & Buchner, A. (2013). Adaptive memory: The survival-processing memory advantage is not due to negativity or mortality salience. Memory & Cognition, 41, 490-502. doi: 10.3758/s13421-012-0290-5.

  1. Meg Giblin
    May 7th, 2014 at 13:18 | #1

    This study is especially interesting because humans tend to focus on negative stimuli over positive stimuli for survival, which is called negativity dominance. So while reading this article, I expected that the survival condition and the death condition would have the same results. Yet after the results of this article were analyzed, I understood that in the survival condition people had better recall because they were applying the object to their survival condition. These results are also related to studying because giving something meaning or applying the term to a real life situation yields better recall. Overall this study gave great insight as to why humans have better recall when in a survival mindset.

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