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Adaptive memory: Young children show enhanced retention of fitness-related information

  • 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.

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Metadaten
Author:Alp AslanORCiD, Karl-Heinz T. Bäuml
URL:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.001
Parent Title (English):Cognition
Document Type:Article (peer reviewed)
Language:English
Publication Year:2012
Tag:Adaptive memory; Cognition in children; Episodic memory; Evolutionary psychology; Survival processing in children
Volume:122
Issue:1
First Page:118
Last Page:122
Peer reviewed:Ja