Survival Processing Occupies the Central Bottleneck of Cognitive Processing: A Psychological Refractory Period Analysis

Abstract

Words judged for relevance in a survival situation are remembered better than words judged for relevance in a non-survival context. This survival processing effect has been explained by selective tuning of human memory during evolution to process and retain information specifically relevant for survival. According to the richness-of-encoding hypothesis, however, the survival processing effect arises from a domain-general mechanism, namely, a particularly rich and distinct form of encoding. This form of information processing is effortful and requires limited cognitive capacities. In our experiment, we used the well-established psychological refractory period framework in conjunction with the effect propagation logic to assess the role of central cognitive resources for the survival processing effect. Our data demonstrate that the survival memory advantage indeed relies on the capacity-limited central stage of cognitive processing. Thus, rating words in the context of a survival scenario involves central processing resources to a greater amount than rating words in a non-survival control condition. We discuss implications for theories of the survival processing effect.