Determining The Factor Responsible For The Memorial Advantages Of SurvivalProcessing

The emergence of evolutionary psychology inspires people to study human’s psychological phenomena from the functional perspective, including the research on memory. In 2007, Nairne and colleague quitting from customary research to proximate mechanism of memory and discovery the survival processing in a functional perspective. They have found that human’s memory system is more sensitivity to remember the fitness content of information. Since that, researchers begin to focus the phenomenon and explore the factor underlie the effect, such as the ancestral priority, familiarity of scenario and the congruent effects. But only congruent effects are well recognized by academics and treated as one of the factors that yield the survival processing advantage. The other theories have not been verified. Some researchers have made explicit claim that the survival processing advantage is not simply caused by congruent effects. The present research was designed under the premise of controlling the congruent effects while to exploring other factors that responsible for survival processing advantage. This study aimed at expanding the factor responsible for the memorial advantages of survival processing and enrich the theoretical explanation.Subjects were selected from a normal university, includes undergraduate and graduate students. Experiments were performed using the classical indirect-learning paradigm. The first experiment use the within-subjects design with two factors in order to verify the existence of ancestral priority effects. The second experiment use within-subjects design with two factors to investigate the role of familiarity in the survival processing and the stress of survival in this memory advantage. The third experiment use the same within-subjects design with two factors to probe the mechanism of the survival processing advantage. Based on the experimental results, we have the following conclusions:First, there is no difference in recall performance between the ancestors had survived situation and had not survived situation. Ancestor priority has its limitations.Second, the familiarity of the processing background does not generate survival processing memory advantage; Survival pressure has specific influence on the survival processing advantage.Third, survival processing advantage partially depends on the size of survival pressure. The advantage is enhanced with the increasing pressure of survival.