The Effect Of Survival Advantage On Different Stage Of Memory

With the rise of evolutionary psychology, it appears a new orientation(function orientation) in the research of memory. As the name suggests, the function orientation of memory refers to memory research from the angle of function. Researchers are very interested in the structure of the memory, while they may neglect the study on the function of memory. Evolutionary psychology has injected new vitality to the study of memory, and opened up a new world in the research of memory, which makes people obtain more comprehensive understanding about memory. The survival advantage of memory was proposed in this context. In the process of adaptation to the environment, as for human beings,the primary task is to survive. Only do people remember the survival information better(such as to help people find the food, predators, information) they are more likely to survive from harsh environments. As a result, the gene can continue. Human beings might show better memory about information from survival. That is to say, the memory has a survival advantage.The purpose of this study is to investigate the survival advantage in the students of junior middle school, in addition, we also want to know whether survival advantage appears in the stage of encoding or retrieval through the experiment.Experiment 1 focuses on survival advantage in the stage of encoding in the students of junior middle school. We compared survival situation of grassland to survival of city by means of Nairne’s paradigms of survival advantage. As a consequence, participates in the survival situation of grassland showed better memory. Experiment 2 and 3 focus on the survival advantage in the stage of retrieval. In experiment 2, participates need to watch different video before free recall, there were two different videos(one is about survival in grassland, the other is about survival in city). We found that the participates who watched the video of survival situation show better memory. In experiment three, participates who were given clues about the survival situation of grassland show better memory. The results of experiment 2 and 3 showed that the group of grassland survival situation had better memory performance than the group of city survival situation. We concluded that the stage retrieval ofmemory appeared survival advantage. Moreover, the result showed that clues benefit to survival advantage. In conclusion, this study showed that survival advantage appeared in the encoding and retrieval stages, showing a double advantage, furthermore, the clues can enhance the advantage.