Adaptive memory
A recent development in the field of evolutionary psychology, adaptive memory was first proposed in 2007 by James S. Nairne, Sarah R. Thompson, and Josefa N.S.
[3] Based on this finding, Nairne and his colleagues proposed that human memory systems are 'tuned' to information relevant to survival.
In the Survival condition, they had to imagine being stranded in a grassland area of a foreign land, and needing to find a steady supply of food and water, and protecting themselves from predators.
Participants were instructed to imagine themselves moving to a foreign land, needing to locate a new home and transporting their possessions.
In the Survival and Moving conditions, participants were asked to rate the relevance of each word on a list to their imagined situation.
[1] An important first step toward a functional analysis of survival processing is thinking about the kinds of problems memory would have evolved to solve.
[1] One major finding is that survival processing has been shown to yield better retention than imagery, self-reference and pleasantness, which are all considered to be among the best conditions for remembering learned information.
The idea that we are able to retain information most relevant to our own survival provides a foundation of research for empirical studying of memory through an evolutionary lens.
This was suggested in a recent study that tested spatial memory for various food items,[12] with additional predictions later extended and validated.
The release of dopamine has been known to be associated with events of a motivationally important nature,[15] and has a role in the creation of episodic memories and the consolidation thereof.
[11] Functional imaging research conducted during an adaptive memory experiment might be able to provide some insight into the exact brain activity responsible for the phenomenon.
[18] Since the rat is a nocturnal feeder and has poor vision, it was suggested that they rely on taste cues to learn to avoid toxic substances, leading to a highly developed chemical sense system.
This finding suggests that since the climate tends to be harsh in Alaska, there may be an increased need to remember where food is hidden, to help them survive through the winter.
[20] Further examination found that unlike monogamous pine voles (who travel together on a permanent basis with their partners), polygamous males have increased mobility (compared to the females) in order to reap reproductive benefits.
This suggestion is based on better performance by male meadow voles on route and place learning tasks in laboratory tests.
[22] Congruence between the processing task and target words leads to deeper and more elaborate encoding, which is thought to explain the survival advantage.
Butler and colleagues conducted three experiments to test this view; the first replicated Nairne's work and confirmed a survival recall advantage.
Further, Howe and Derbish state, if survival information is more distinctive and processed at an item-specific contextual level, false memory rates should be low.
Weinstein and colleagues conducted two experiments, the first duplicating Nairne's findings, and the second comparing the survival advantage to schematic and self-referential processing.
[25] These experiments present a problem for the assumption of the importance of the ancestral environment because retention was better for information processed under a non-African savannah context, something not predicted by the theory of adaptive memory.
[27] This finding suggests that fitness-relevance is too amorphous of a construct to explain the mnemonic benefit found with survival processing[28] and Sandry et al. suggest that research efforts should be directed at identifying the underlying mechanisms and developing a taxonomy of adaptive memory,[27] similar to evolutionary biology.
[5] Future research should be conducted with a wide variety of items such as pictures, categorized lists, and content specific materials (for example, those related to food, reproduction, predators and other survival-relevant domains).
[22][27] Finally, neuroimaging research has yet to be done to address any neurological activity that may be different in adaptive memory processing compared to normal conditions.
