2009 — 2013 |
Nairne, James |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Functional Determinants of Memory
Functional Determinants of Memory James S. Nairne
Abstract
Our capacity to remember is certainly the product of an extended period of evolution. Yet if human memory evolved, sculpted by the processes of natural selection, then its processes likely bear the "footprints" of ancestral selection pressures. In particular, our memory systems should be "tuned" to retain information that is fitness-relevant, pertaining to survival and reproduction. Until recently, psychologists have ignored this possibility, but work in the researcher's laboratory has shown that thinking about the survival relevance of information leads to superior long-term memory -- better, in fact, than virtually all known study techniques. As one example, asking experimental participants to rate a list of arbitrarily selected words for each item's potential survival value leads to significantly higher rates of recall and recognition than traditional study procedures (e.g., even effective techniques such as rating items for pleasantness or forming a visual image). Still, the psychological mechanisms that underlie fitness-relevant memory processing remain essentially unknown and largely unexplored. Do we have special memory mechanisms designed to retain fitness-relevant information? Are these mechanisms rooted in the remnants of a stone-age brain? Our research explores these questions by comparing and contrasting how memory operates in fitness-relevant and fitness-irrelevant situations. The research investigates memory's role in the formation of social contracts as well, and in the processing of prospective mating partners. Do people have special memory mechanisms for retaining information about people who cheat, perform altruistic acts, and for potential mates? Answers to these questions will be determined by having people imagine themselves in fitness-relevant situations, such as seeking food or a prospective mate, followed by the administration of diagnostic retention tests. Previous work suggests that the study of adaptive memory may lead to a fundamental reconceptualization of basic memory mechanisms: Rather than general processes designed to operate the same way in all environments, memory's operating characteristics may well vary depending on the particular problem context.
To understand how memory works, and to develop effective techniques for memory improvement, it is essential to understand the function of memory and, more specifically, to understand how and why memory evolved. Memory likely evolved to help us solve adaptive problems, such as finding food, avoiding predators, or attracting prospective mates. Recognizing the adaptive roots of memory is key to understanding its basic mechanisms, just as understanding the adaptive function of the heart or the liver is vital to understanding their ultimate structure. The researcher's research systematically explores the function of memory in fitness-relevant contexts, such as the search for food, the avoidance of predators, or in assessing the trustworthiness of potential cheaters. Understanding how memory is used to solve the problems of survival, the formation of social contracts, and reproduction will provide critical insight into how and why memory systems formed, and why they work the way they do. As our understanding of memory's inherent "tunings" increases, our ability to calibrate our learning strategies, and to teach others to remember effectively, will increase as well. For example, educators commonly promote study strategies based on the processing of meaning, or "visualizing" the material, whereas the researcher has shown that a few seconds of focused adaptive processing (i.e., how is the material relevant to survival or dealing with significant others) produces substantially better long-term retention.
|
0.915 |
2015 — 2018 |
Nairne, James |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Adaptive Memory
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.
|
0.915 |