a Department of Psychology , Union College , Schenectady , NY , USA.
Memory. 2014;22(1):36-50. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2013.788660. Epub 2013 Apr 22.
Processing items for their relevance to survival improves recall for those items relative to numerous other deep processing encoding techniques. Perhaps related, placing individuals in a mortality salient state has also been shown to enhance retention of items encoded after the morality salience manipulation (e.g., in a pleasantness rating task), a phenomenon we dubbed the "dying-to-remember" (DTR) effect. The experiments reported here further explored the effect and tested the possibility that the DTR effect is related to survival processing. Experiment 1 replicated the effect using different encoding tasks, demonstrating that the effect is not dependent on the pleasantness task. In Experiment 2 the DTR effect was associated with increases in item-specific processing, not relational processing, according to several indices. Experiment 3 replicated the main results of Experiment 2, and tested the effects of mortality salience and survival processing within the same experiment. The DTR effect and its associated difference in item-specific processing were completely eliminated when the encoding task required survival processing. These results are consistent with the interpretation that the mechanisms responsible for survival processing and DTR effects are overlapping.
对项目进行与生存相关的处理可以提高对这些项目的回忆，相对于许多其他深度处理编码技术。也许相关的是，将个体置于一个突显生命的状态也被证明可以增强在道德突显操作后编码的项目的保留（例如，在愉快性评定任务中），我们将这种现象称为“死亡记忆”（DTR）效应。这里报告的实验进一步探讨了这种效应，并检验了 DTR 效应与生存处理有关的可能性。实验 1 使用不同的编码任务复制了这种效应，表明这种效应不依赖于愉快性任务。在实验 2 中，根据几个指标，DTR 效应与项目特异性处理的增加有关，而不是关系处理。实验 3 复制了实验 2 的主要结果，并在同一个实验中测试了死亡突显和生存处理的效果。当编码任务需要生存处理时，DTR 效应及其相关的项目特异性处理差异完全消除。这些结果与以下解释一致，即负责生存处理和 DTR 效应的机制是重叠的。
