Survival processing versus self-reference: A memory advantage following descriptive self-referential encoding

Abstract

Previous research has shown that rating words for their relevance to a survival scenario leads to better retention of the words than rating them for self-reference. Past studies have, however, relied exclusively on an autobiographical self-reference task in which participants rate how easily a common noun brings to mind a personal experience. We report five experiments comparing survival processing to a descriptive self-reference task in which participants rated how well trait words described them. Rating trait adjectives for survival value led to higher levels of recall and recognition than rating them for their relevance to a moving home scenario. Rating the adjectives for self-reference, however, led to higher levels of recall (Experiments 1 and 3) and recollection (Experiment 2) than survival rating. Experiment 4 replaced trait adjectives with trait nouns and found that self-reference led to greater recognition accuracy than survival processing. Experiment 5 used trait nouns followed by tests of free recall and found a memory advantage following self-reference that was not influenced by the imageability of the stimuli. The findings are discussed in terms of theories of the survival processing and self-reference effects and the relationship between them.

Adaptive memory: The mnemonic power of survival-based generation.

“…Demonstrating that the survival advantage remains intact when paired against an autobiographical control is important because self-referential processing has frequently been used to account for the survival benefit in the traditional relevance-rating paradigm (e.g., Burns et al, 2011;Cunningham et al, 2013;Dewhurst et al, 2017). In our original report (Nairne et al, 2007), we used a self-relevant control that required people to rate how easily a target This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

“…Demonstrating that the survival advantage remains intact when paired against an autobiographical control is important because self-referential processing has frequently been used to account for the survival benefit in the traditional relevance-rating paradigm (e.g., Burns et al, 2011; Cunningham et al, 2013; Dewhurst et al, 2017). In our original report (Nairne et al, 2007), we used a self-relevant control that required people to rate how easily a target word “brings to mind an important personal experience.” Survival processing produced significantly better retention than this control condition, but Klein (2012) argued persuasively that participants must actually retrieve the autobiographical experience to maximize the beneficial effect of self-relevant processing; simply asking the participant to rate the ease with which something comes to mind may not require retrieval of any specific autobiographical event.…”

“…At issue is whether the activation of these general processes can be attributed to fitness-relevant processing or to some artifactual element of the experimental procedure. For example, it could be that the standard grasslands survival scenario encourages people to think about target stimuli in a way that is more self-referential (Cunningham et al, 2013; Dewhurst et al, 2017) or richer (Kroneisen & Erdfelder, 2011) or more functional (Bell et al, 2015) than common control procedures. One can attempt to equate the survival and control scenarios across such dimensions, and that has motivated much of the research on survival processing (see Kazanas & Altarriba, 2015), but there is no easy way to determine the processing dimensions that are actually activated by any assigned scenario.…”

“…Because the generation procedure is flexible, we were able to develop a control procedure that addresses at least one prominent account of the survival advantage as well: self-referential processing. A number of researchers have suggested that survival processing may induce, at least in part, a kind of self-referential processing (Burns et al, 2011; Dewhurst, Anderson, Grace, & Boland, 2017; Klein, 2012). Relating information to the self, such as when people are asked to decide whether trait adjectives are self-descriptive, is generally agreed to have a powerful effect on long-term retention (for a review, see Symons & Johnson, 1997).…”

Effects of survival processing on list method directed forgetting

“…Typically, no rationale has been given for selecting one task (e.g., pleasantness) as opposed to the other (e.g., moving). Beyond this, other work has made use of a variety of encoding control tasks such as ratings of self-relevance (e.g., Dewhurst, Anderson, Grace, & Boland, 2017), or zombie attacks, (e.g., Bonin et al, 2019). Use of these (and maybe even relevance) as control tasks remain for future work that combines adaptive memory processing and directed forgetting.…”