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“Survival Processing of the Selfish Gene?”: Adaptive Memory and Inclusive Fitness

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Abstract

The survival processing advantage in memory is the finding that items encoded in survival scenarios are remembered better than words encoded in survival-irrelevant scenarios or in deep encoding situations (e.g., pleasantness). Whether this mnemonic advantage, which is generally found in scenarios involving personal survival, can also be observed in scenarios involving the survival of other people, and in particular, genetically related others, has received little attention. In the present study, we asked nulliparous women to imagine being stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land without any basic survival items and to consider either their personal survival, the survival of their biological child, or the survival of an orphan. Compared to a pleasantness (control) condition, a survival processing advantage was found for the child survival group, which did not differ reliably from personal survival. Both the child and the personal survival conditions yielded better recall than the orphan condition, which did not reliably differ from the pleasantness condition. These findings provide further evidence for the view that memory has been sculpted by evolutionary processes such as inclusive fitness.

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Notes

  1. However, the authors did not find a reproduction processing advantage when the scenario emphasized finding a mate (see also Derringer et al. 2017; Sandry et al. 2013; but see Pandeirada et al. 2017 for a mnemonic advantage in the mating domain).

  2. Power was computed using the cumulative non-central F distribution function available in IBM SPSS® version 24. It corresponds to the probability of obtaining a value in the region that permits rejection of the null hypothesis, given the group size and the estimated effect size.

  3. δ was computed as the ratio of the difference between the observed means over the square root of the mean square error.

  4. At the item level, a significant difference was found for only one item, i.e., item number 9, which corresponded to the statement “When someone is feeling ‘down’ I can usually understand how they feel”, F(3, 236) = 3.17, p = .025, \( {\eta}_P^2 \) = .039. However, no pairwise comparisons reached significance with the Tukey tests (lowest p = .09).

  5. As stressed by Nairne et al. (2017a), the question of whether survival processing is due to the involvement of proximate mechanisms such as elaboration (e.g., Erdfelder and Kroneisen 2014) should not be conceived as ruling out an evolutionary account of this effect because, as these authors have convincingly argued, adaptations often mobilize basic processes to achieve their functions.

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  1. LEAD-CNRS (UMR 5022), Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté, Pôle AAFE - Esplanade Erasme, BP 26513, 21000, Dijon Cedex, France

    Patrick Bonin, Margaux Gelin & Betty Laroche

  2. CNRS, LAPSCO, Université Clermont-Auvergne, 63000-F Clermont-Ferrand, France

    Alain Méot

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  1. Patrick Bonin
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  4. Alain Méot
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Bonin, P., Gelin, M., Laroche, B. et al. “Survival Processing of the Selfish Gene?”: Adaptive Memory and Inclusive Fitness. Evolutionary Psychological Science 6, 155–165 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-019-00220-1

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