Department of Educational Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, New Territories, Hong Kong, China.
Mem Cognit. 2010 Dec;38(8):1110-21. doi: 10.3758/MC.38.8.1110.
Recent research has shown that human memory may have evolved to remember information that has been processed for the purpose of survival, more so than information that has been processed for other purposes, such as home-moving. We investigated this survival-processing advantage using both explicit and implicit memory tests. In Experiment 1, participants rated words in one of three scenarios: survival, pleasantness, and moving, followed by a timed stem-cued recall/stem-cued completion task. Items were completed more quickly in the survival scenario, as compared with the other two for the explicit task, but no differences were found across conditions in the implicit task. In Experiment 2, the implicit task was changed to concreteness judgments to encourage more conceptual processing. Again, the survival-processing advantage occurred in the explicit task (speeded item recognition), but not in the implicit task. These results suggest that a survival-processing advantage may benefit participants' memory performance only during explicit retrieval.
最近的研究表明，人类的记忆可能已经进化到能够记住那些为了生存而处理的信息，而不是为了其他目的（如搬家）而处理的信息。我们使用了显性和隐性记忆测试来研究这种生存处理优势。在实验 1 中，参与者在三个场景中的一个场景中对单词进行评分：生存、愉快和移动，然后进行限时茎提示回忆/茎提示完成任务。与其他两个场景相比，在显性任务中，生存场景下的项目完成速度更快，但在隐性任务中，条件之间没有差异。在实验 2 中，隐性任务改为具体性判断，以鼓励更多的概念性处理。同样，在显性任务（加快项目识别）中出现了生存处理优势，但在隐性任务中没有出现。这些结果表明，生存处理优势可能只在显性检索时对参与者的记忆表现有帮助。
