Survival Processing Advantage Effect

Studies demonstrating a mnemonic benefit for encoding words in a survival scenario have revived interest in how human memory is shaped by evolutionary pressures.The study explored the mechanism of the survival processing effect,and mainly about one phenomenon and two possible explanations.In study 1,a between subject design was used to compare the correct recall of standard grassland survival condition and a modern city war condition,and the main proportion of words recalled for two encoding conditions are not statistically significant.This means there is no ancient priority in the survival processing effect.Meanwhile,we use the ECG module and the EDA module of BIOPAC MP150 to record the heart rate,galvanic skin response and heart rate variety.From comparing the baseline period and the encoding period,we found that in the standard grassland survival condition,there is no significant change of the heart rate,the galvanic skin response and the LF and HF of the HRV.But the LF/HF of the baseline is higher than the encoding period.In the city condition,except for the heart rate,all of the other variables are not statistically significant.This result represents that none of the survival encoding conditions are activated the threat defense mechanism.The survival processing mission is more like a problem-solving question.In study 2,we explored the theory of richness of encoding.The survival processing conditions are still use those in the study 1,meanwhile,we added a control condition,the pleasantness rating condition.The rating words are also changed,half of the words are concrete word and half of them are abstract word.Then we found that for the correct recall rate,there is no difference between the standard grassland survival and the city war survival,but the two survival conditions are both higher than the pleasantness rating survival.A significant survival processing effect is observed.For the concrete words,two survival conditions are both higher than the pleasantness rating condition,but for the abstract words,there is no difference between those three conditions.At the same time,we also recorded the rating score of each word in each condition.All the rating score of the concrete words are higher than the abstract word.In conclusion,we believe that survival processing is more elaborating than the control condition,therefore the survival processing effect exists.