TY - JOUR A1 - Aslan, Alp A1 - John, Thomas T1 - The development of adaptive memory: Young children show enhanced retention of animacy-related information JF - Journal of Experimental Child Psychology N2 - Previous developmental work has indicated that animacy is a foundational ontogenetic category that is given priority already early in life. Here, we investigated whether such priority is also present in children’s episodic memory, examining whether young children show enhanced retention of animacy-related information. Kindergartners and younger and older elementary school children were presented with fictitious (non)words (e.g., BULA, LAFE) paired with properties characteristic of humans (e.g., “likes music”), (nonhuman) animals (e.g., “builds nests”), and inanimate things (e.g., “has four edges”) and were asked to rate the animacy status of each nonword. After a retention interval, a surprise recognition test for the nonwords was administered. We found enhanced recognition of nonwords paired with human and animal properties compared with (the same) nonwords paired with inanimate properties. The size of this animacy advantage was comparable across age groups, suggesting developmental invariance of the advantage over the age range examined (i.e., 4–11 years). The results support a functional–evolutionary view on memory, suggesting that already young children’s memory is “tuned” to process and retain animacy. KW - Cognitive development KW - Evolutionary psychology KW - Episodic memory KW - Adaptive memory KW - Ancestral priorities KW - Mnemonic animacy advantage in children Y1 - 2021 UR - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2016.07.007 VL - 152 SP - 343 EP - 350 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Aslan, Alp A1 - Bäuml, Karl-Heinz T. T1 - Adaptive memory: Young children show enhanced retention of fitness-related information JF - Cognition N2 - Evolutionary psychologists propose that human cognition evolved through natural selection to solve adaptive problems related to survival and reproduction, with its ultimate function being the enhancement of reproductive fitness. Following this proposal and the evolutionary-developmental view that ancestral selection pressures operated not only on reproductive adults, but also on pre-reproductive children, the present study examined whether young children show superior memory for information that is processed in terms of its survival value. In two experiments, we found such survival processing to enhance retention in 4- to 10-year-old children, relative to various control conditions that also required deep, meaningful processing but were not related to survival. These results suggest that, already in very young children, survival processing is a special and extraordinarily effective form of memory encoding. The results support the functional-evolutionary proposal that young children’s memory is “tuned” to process and retain fitness-related information. KW - Cognition in children KW - Evolutionary psychology KW - Adaptive memory KW - Episodic memory KW - Survival processing in children Y1 - 2021 UR - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.001 VL - 122 IS - 1 SP - 118 EP - 122 ER -