Adaptive Memory: The Mnemonic Power of Survival-Based Generation

Four experiments investigated the mnemonic effects of generating survival situations. People were given target words and asked to generate survival situations involving that stimulus (e.g., DOOR: "I'm in a house that's on fire. and I can escape through the door"). No constraints were placed on the generation process, other than that it must be survival-related and refer to the target stimulus. Following a series of these generation trials people were given a surprise retention test for the target words. Across four experiments the survival generation task produced significantly better retention than several deep processing controls including: (a) a pleasantness-rating task, (b) an autobiographical retrieval task, and (c) a task that required people to generate unusual uses for the target items. These results demonstrate the power of survival processing in a new way and provide diagnostic information about the proximate mechanisms that may underlie survival processing advantages. They also extend the generality of survival processing beyond the standard relevance-rating procedure that has been used in virtually all prior research.