The Survival Advantages:the Evidence From Junior School Students

Evolutionary psychological theory believes that the human cognitive system is evolved gradually in the process of solving the adaptive problems which are related to survival and reproduction.So,it is a adaptive memory.Following this view,our memory system should have a better memory about survival and reproduction information.In 2007,through situation priming,Nairne and his colleagues studied the situations of survival in the grasslands,moving and vacation.The results suggest in the situation of survival,subjects achieve better memory on the just rated words than other well-known processing.Then,other researchers also study survival in the grasslands and other matched situations,and the results also support Narine’s viewpoint.Therefore,they called this phenomenon mnemonic advantages for survival processing or survival advantages.However,the previous research mainly aimed at adults.Compared with teenagers,adults have the following two characteristics: First,they use some of the memory strategies more easily during information processing and extraction.Second,their knowledge and experience about grassland survival are relatively rich.This leads to the survival processing advantages may not be caused by adaptive information,but because of memory processing strategies that adults use in the information processing and extraction spontaneously and rich knowledge and experience about grassland survival.Therefore,in order to reduce the impact of the characteristics of adults on the experimental results,we used junior high school students to study the survival processing advantages with three experiments.Experiment 1 is a between-subjects design.subjects are 180 junior school students,who are divided into three groups.One group are asked to trigger survival situation,another group trigger Scavenger Hunt situation,and the third one doesn’t trigger any situation.Then,the first two groups respectively are asked to rate the common nouns with 5 rating scale for the relevance between survival(Scavenger Hunt)situation and the nouns.The third group rating these words according to the pleasant of the words.After rating,there is a distraction task,and then,all of subjects are asked to write down the rating words before.The results show that the free recall performance of survival group is significant better than other two groups’.The research use within-subject design and recognition further investigate whether junior students show survival advantages.The results suggest junior school students’ free recall and recognition performance in grassland survival is significantly better than Scavenger Hunt group.The three experiments’ results conclude that there is survival advantages of junior school students,and support the view that our memory develops in evolutionary.