Adaptive Memory

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

Identifying and understanding factors that improve human memory is one of the central aims of human memory research, with important societal implications for education, training, enhancing cognitive performance, and rehabilitating the memory-impaired. This project investigates a recently discovered means of improving memory known as the survival processing effect, whereby thinking about an item in terms of its potential survival utility in an imagined survival scenario greatly improves memory for that item relative to other known mnemonic techniques. This project is aimed at understanding why the survival processing benefit to memory occurs. Specifically, what are the underlying mechanisms responsible for the dramatic levels of memory improvement shown over other known memory-enhancing techniques? Is a deeply ingrained evolutionary basis responsible, or can the effect be explained by factors such as increased encoding variability brought on by the type of elaboration involved in imagining the survival scenarios? Understanding this will increase understanding of the overall operation of human memory more generally, including the basis of dramatic memory improvement in certain situations. Based on this understanding, this project will additionally attempt to identify and investigate other ways in which memory for particular items might be improved over and above the improvement shown using well-established mnemonic techniques. The research team will investigate hypotheses concerning the possible proximate mechanisms that produce the enhanced memory in imagined survival situations. For example, survival processing may naturally lead to variable encodings, or connections to other things in memory, that benefit later retrieval. To test this hypothesis, experiments are proposed that limit (or not) the extent to which people can use variable encodings to aid retrieval after survival-based processing. In addition to attempting to identify the proximate mechanisms of the survival processing effect, the research team will also explore a new area by investigating the mnemonic consequences of potential imagined contamination--do people remember objects that are said to have been touched by a sick person better than those said to have been touched by a healthy person? Avoiding contamination is extremely relevant to survival, and preliminary research suggests that people preferentially remember potentially contaminated objects; thus, this is a promising new area to explore beyond survival processing.