| In the study of memory function,researchers have begun to explore whether the memory system exists a preference to remember things with special attributes in the face of specific adaptive problems(such as remembering the enemy’s face,the nature of food,the type of predator,etc.).In the perspective of an adaptive memory system,some scholars proposed that we inherited the memory system from a Stone-Age Brain of ancestors(Nairne & Pandeirada,2008a;J.S.Nairne & J.N.Pandeirada,2010).Survival is an important adaptive problem that human have to face.This is especially true for humans in the ancient times because of limited infrastructure to support their survival.Thus,their memory system eventually formed a preference for information that is beneficial for survival(for example,the location of food and the habit of predator).Due to the importance of survival to humans,this preference may also be inherited by the brains of modern humans.In order to verify this hypothesis,Nairne et al.used the survival processing paradigm and found that subjects under survival conditions had better word memory scores than subjects under non-survival conditions,presenting a survival processing advantage.But does the memory advantage only exist in survival-related information? Some researchers started to focus on death related to survival,using imagination or scene presentation to remind subjects of their mortality.Inconsistent results have been found.Some research showed that mortality salience can make subjects recall more words("Dying to Remember" effect,DTR effect)(Burns,Hart,Kramer,et al.,2014),while others did not found this effect.Moreover,some scholars have found that the processing of the death scenario improves the wrong memory of subjects rather than the correct memory.Besides,these studies focused only on item information memory for both death and survival processing.Limited research have explored the influences of death and survival processing on contextual information memory,which can also be referred to as source information(Johnson et al.,1993),is various scene detail features of the item information,such as temporal features,space features,visual features,perception features,and cognitive features.Under the conditions of survival processing and mortality salience,does the memory of contextual information have similar characteristics to the item information? The current study was aimed to investigate this question to fill the gap.1n Study 1(Experiment 1),we explored the characteristics of item information memory under the condition of mortality salience,and compared it with survival processing.In Study 2,we investigated the characteristics of the source information memory under the condition of mortality salience in the perspective of processing condition source information(experiment 2)and position source information(experiment 3),which was also compared with the survival processing.In Experiment 1,using free recall scores of the words as indicators,we compared the scores of the item information under the condition of mortality salience,survival processing and pleasantness rating.Results showed that the correct free recall performance of survival processing was better than that of mortality salience and pleasantness rating.Free recall score of death mortality was lower than that of pleasantness rating.And the false memories of survival processing and mortality salience were more than that of pleasantness rating.In Experiment 2,we used source judgment as a way to measure the processing condition source information of the words and compared the memory scores of the processing condition source information under the condition of mortality salience,survival processing and pleasantness rating.Results showed that the correct rate under the condition of earthquake mortality salience was lower than that under the condition of pleasantness rating,and the correct rate under the condition of grassland survival was lower than that under the condition of pleasantness rating.In Experiment 3,we used source judgment as a way to measure the position source information of the words and compared the memory scores of the position source information under the condition of mortality salience,survival processing and pleasantness rating.Results showed that there was no significant difference in the correct judgment of position source information among the condition of mortality salience,survival processing and pleasantness rating.In Experiment 1,mortality salience did not show the same performance as the survival processing in correct recall.However,in the false memories,both mortality salience and survival processing showed the same level of scores.In Experiment 2,there was no significant difference in the recognition scores between the condition of mortality salience and survival processing.But mortality salience had a higher rate of false reporting than survival processing.In Experiment 3,there was no significant difference in recognition scores between the condition of mortality salience and survival processing. |
