Survival processing - Tutorial PDF

Preview

Summary

Tutorial...

Description

Survival processing Information that people process from a survival context gets easily imprinted in their memory making it easy to remember. This term is what many psychologists and scientists consider as the “survival processing effect”. The idea drawn from this type of processing is that there are high chances that people will easily remember information when faced with situations that involve deep levels of processing rather than shallow levels of processing. Does this mean that our memory systems have evolved from the times our ancestors had to face harsh survival scenarios? This is partly true because studies show that survival processing is something that gradually imprinted itself into humans from our ancestral past and it is even attributed to some of the fitness advantages gained from our ancestral past. Therefore, it is not wrong to consider survival processing as an evolutionary process passed on through generations as an adaptive memory that human beings have developed, and it helps them process information that requires depth processing. My first argument originates from the article by (Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada, 2007) who studied survival processing as an adaptive memory that helps in the remembrance of fitness-relevant information with an emphasis on survival. Their study involved four different learning experiments identical in nature. These participants needed to formulate decisions regarding the relevance of certain words in a survival scenario. The first experiment involved the rating of 30 unrelated words to three different survival scenarios and stating whether the words were relevant or irrelevant according to each scenario (Nairne, Thompson and Pandeirada, 2007). The second experiment replicated the first one but it constituted a within-subject design using 38 psychology students. This design is helps control participant-level issues which mainly constituted the unequal distribution of participant characteristics (Nairne, Thompson and

Pandeirada, 2007). The third experiment involved a follow up on the second experiment but it focused on recognition memory. The fourth experiment looked to compare survival processing with control conditions because both needed deep processing. The experiments conducted by Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada followed a functional perspective of questioning the evolution of our memory systems with an assumption that memory functioning is content dependent (Nairne, Thompson and Pandeirada, 2007). The four experiments conducted by the three researchers show that information processing enhanced retention according to its survival value. This processing is relative to deep processing control conditions. For my second argument, I will be drawing my information from the article “Adaptive Memory: Survival Processing and Social Isolation” by Juliana K. Leding and Michael P. Toglia. Their article examines social isolation and uses it to conclude whether it has a significant influence on the survival processing effect. These two researchers also follow the principle of survival processing where people are likely to retain information about the things they learn and process when faced with a survival situation. Leding and Toglia also draw some of their research from the works of Nairne, Thompson and Pandeirada. Leding and Toglia conducted two experiments in their study (Leding and Toglia, 2018). The first one consisted of 143 students from the University of North Florida with 113 of them as women. The two researches reused the same words that got utilized in the study conducted by Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada. Their first experiment placed the different students in isolation and others in groups and they aimed to assess the degree by which participants understood social isolation in varying scenarios. Their experiment consisted of three scenarios of survival grasslands, moving and a space mission and the participants got placed in group conditions and others placed in isolation

conditions but the scenarios remained similar (Leding and Toglia, 2018). The selection of participants was random and each participant read his or her scenario from a computer. The second experiment consisted of 96 participants with 78 of them women. This experiment used the same words from the 128 found in the original survival processing study for recognition. The second experiment consisted of two scenarios and the same conditions of isolation and groups. The second experiment was similar to the first one but there are elements of distraction that got included to test the retaining capability of the students. From the two experiments conducted, the information processed by the students in regards to the grasslands survival scenario got easily retained compared to the other conditions that involved moving to a foreign land and the space mission (Leding and Toglia, 2018). The major difference in this experiment compared to the one conducted by Nairne et al. is that the isolation scenarios got directly manipulated. This was through altering the original scenarios by suggesting that the participant might be involved in the scenario with a number of friends (Leding and Toglia, 2018). From the results obtained, higher levels of recall were recorded in the grasslands scenario which also recorded heightened levels of perceived isolation despite the isolation manipulation used (Leding and Toglia, 2018). Leding and Toglia established that scenario affected recall because the participants showed the highest recall rates with the grasslands situation in comparison with other situations. The second experiment aimed at providing additional evidence in proving that survival processing is not solely influenced by isolation. Leding and Toglia established that there was, however, a marginal significance of isolation but the results they obtained showed a pattern that suggested the survival processing effect stretches across all isolation conditions. From the experiments done by Leding and Toglia, their results suggest that survival processing is an

evolutionary process because the participants showed increased amounts of recall in the grasslands situation in comparison to the rest (Leding and Toglia, 2018). This finding suggests that survival processing is something that might have developed and evolved through our ancestors and got passed on to us. A third source that back my argument is the experiment that was conducted by Savchenko, Borges and Pandeirada to investigate how procedural changes can result in failure to replicate survival mnemonic advantages. The first experiment contained category labels while the second one did not and the participating students were 62 in number. We know that survival processing is characterized by an improved performance that results from information processing when faced with survival scenarios. This experiment was designed to help find out why failure can occur if procedural changes get altered. Savchenko, Borges and Pandeirada also aimed at finding possible points of debate to contribute to the mechanism underlying the survival effect. Their experiments failed to replicate the survival effect because of their procedures and because they followed the work of Marinho (2012). However, one thing their experiment helped in concluding is that survival processing is a great encoding procedure that humans use to process information (Savchenko, Borges and Pandeirada, 2014). This process could only have gotten refined through generations and generations as an evolutionary process passed down from parent to offspring. In light of the results of the three experiments I have mentioned, I argue that survival processing is based on evolutionary mechanisms that continue to develop with time.

References Nairne, J. S., Thompson, S. R., & Pandeirada, J. N. (2007). Adaptive memory: Survival processing enhances retention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(2), 263. Leding, J. K., & Toglia, M. P. (2018). Adaptive Memory: Survival Processing and Social Isolation. Evolutionary Psychology, 16(3), 1474704918789297. Savchenko, A., Borges, T., & Pandeirada, J. (2014). The survival processing effect with intentional learning of ad hoc categories. Journal of European Psychology Students, 5(1)....