Abstract
Previous studies have shown that memory is adapted to remember information when it is processed in a survival context. This study investigates how procedural changes in Marinho (2012) study might have led to her failure to replicate the survival mnemonic advantage. In two between-subjects design experiments, participants were instructed to learn words from ad hoc categories and to rate their relevance to a survival or a control scenario. No survival advantage was obtained in either experiment. The Adjusted Ratio of Clustering (ARC) scores revealed that including the category labels made the participants rely more on the category structure of the list. Various procedural aspects of the conducted experiments are discussed as possible reasons underlying the absence of the survival effect.
Highlights
Since the original study, many studies have replicated the mnemonic advantage afforded by survival processing manipulating different variables and using a variety of different procedures
Retrieval Induced Forgetting (RIF) refers to a lower recall of items from the practiced categories that were not practiced during the retrieval-practice phase, as compared to the items from the categories that were never practiced (i.e. RP- < NRP)
Final free recall is the dependent variable of greatest interest as it reveals whether the survival advantage was obtained in our study; we hypothesised that participants would recall more words in the survival condition than in the moving to a foreign land condition
Summary
Many studies have replicated the mnemonic advantage afforded by survival processing manipulating different variables and using a variety of different procedures. Another important difference in this procedure is the inclusion of a retrieval-practice phase focused on the categorical organisation of the items given that one of the retrieval cues was the category label She used a cued-recall test, which did not produce the survival advantage in a previous study (Tse & Altarriba, 2010). We eliminated the retrieval practice task, a RIF design was no longer used; and replaced the cued-recall task with a free recall task, a task that has replicated the effect in a number of previous investigations (Nairne & Pandeirada, 2008a; Nairne et al, 2008, 2007; Weinstein, Bugg, & Roediger, 2008) We believe these changes will promote the survival advantage, as the procedure resembles more the traditional procedure of the survival paradigm (Nairne et al, 2007). We will explore the contribution of item-specific and of relational processing to the survival mnemonic advantage using several dependent measures, such as: the cumulative-recall curves and the Adjusted Ratio of Clustering (ARC)
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