Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2081, USA.
Cogn Psychol. 2010 Aug;61(1):1-22. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2010.01.005. Epub 2010 Mar 6.
Evolutionary psychologists often propose that humans carry around "stone-age" brains, along with a toolkit of cognitive adaptations designed originally to solve hunter-gatherer problems. This perspective predicts that optimal cognitive performance might sometimes be induced by ancestrally-based problems, those present in ancestral environments, rather than by adaptive problems faced more commonly in modern environments. This prediction was examined in four experiments using the survival processing paradigm, in which retention is tested after participants process information in terms of its relevance to fitness-based scenarios. In each of the experiments, participants remembered information better after processing its relevance in an ancestral environment (the grasslands), compared to a modern urban environment (a city), despite the fact that all scenarios described similar fitness-relevant problems. These data suggest that our memory systems may be tuned to ancestral priorities.
进化心理学家常提出，人类携带着“石器时代”的大脑，以及一套最初旨在解决狩猎采集者问题的认知适应工具。这种观点预测，最佳认知表现有时可能是由基于祖先的问题引起的，这些问题存在于祖先环境中，而不是由在现代环境中更常见的适应性问题引起的。本研究通过生存处理范式中的四项实验检验了这一预测，在该范式中，参与者根据与适应度相关的场景来处理信息后，对保留的信息进行测试。在每一项实验中，与处理现代城市环境（城市）相比，参与者在处理与祖先环境（草原）相关的信息后，能更好地记住信息，尽管所有场景都描述了相似的与适应度相关的问题。这些数据表明，我们的记忆系统可能已经调整到适应祖先的优先级。
