A Comparison Between Survival Processing And Self-reference In Memory

Participants will have better memories after the survival scenario is processed.This phenomenon is called the advantage effect of survival processing.Previous studies have found that the survival processing advantage is a stable and powerful memory advantage.The survival processing group is even better than the self-reference processing group at the memory level(Nairne,Thompson,& Pandeirada,2007;Lu Lili,2015).However,stephen A.Dewhurst(2017)believes that previous studies used autobiographical self-reference tasks,which may be the reason why self-reference and survival processing have equal memory levels.Dewhurst used descriptive self-reference tasks and found that the memory level of the self-reference group was higher than that of the survival processing group(Dewhurst,Anderson,Grace,& Boland,2017).Previous studies focused on comparing the memory levels of the self-reference group and the survival processing group on item memory,however the results obtained still need to be further verified,and it is not clear that if descriptive self-reference tasks are used,both survival processing and self-reference Who is better at the source memory level.In this study,four experiments were used to compare the memory levels of survival processing and self-reference by combining several paradigms.The purpose was to find a better mnemonic measure.At the same time,using ERPs technology to explore the neural mechanism behind this memory contrast.Experiment 1 used the recall task paradigm to explore the differences in the recall between the survival processing group and the self-reference group.The purpose is to explore the characteristics of survival processing and selfreference in item memory;Experiment 2 uses two subexperiments,using the standard source memory paradigm at the same time,comparing the source memory of survival processing and the source memory of self-reference;Experiment 3 uses a total of three levels of design within the group to explore the neural mechanism behind the comparison between survival processing and self-reference memory.The results found that:(1)We repeated the advantage effect of survival processing and found that self-referential item memory is better than that of survival processing;(2)self-reference is better than survival processing in terms of vocabulary recognition,but Self-referenced source memory level is equal to survival processing;(3)The results show that there is no significant difference between the three processing conditions on the average amplitude of P3.On the average amplitude of PSW,we found that the self-reference group produced more amplitude in the frontal area、 left side and midline than the survival and moving processing.In summary,the results of the research indicate that self-referenced item memory is better than that of survival processing;the advantage of self-reference over survival processing on item memory may not be generalized to source memory,but overall self-reference is a better memory measure than survival processing.The mechanism behind this may be that self-reference has produced socially approving judgments,which results in the self-referential item memory level being better than that of survival processing.In source memory,it may be that cognitive load weakens the role of self-reference in the late period of continuous attention,and survival processing may be the result of psychological evolution.The two work together to make self-reference and survival processing have the same source memory level.We have not found evidence of the role of self-reference processing on the ERP data.The current results prove the adaptive hypothesis of survival processing from the negative side.