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Adaptive memory: Ancestral priorities and the mnemonic value of survival processing

James S. Nairne, Josefa N.S. Pandeirada

       The purpose of Nairne and Pandeirada's research was to test the “stone-age brains” theory that has been proposed by many evolutionary psychologists. This theory asserts that because the human brain's evolution occurred during the stone age that our brains will be better adapted to accessing information given in an ancient context. Evolutionary psychology stresses that genes alone do not cause behaviour and cognition directly, rather it is an interaction between the environment and these genes. However, there is a standard set of psychological mechanisms that all mankind shares and these mechanisms were decided by natural selection to help give humans an advantage. By studying these mechanisms, such as memory processing in terms of fitness value seen in this article, in the context of their ancestral environment and the modern environment we can see if our mind has caught up with the dangers of modern day or if it is still dwelling in the savannahs of the Pleistocene era.

      Nairne and Pandeirada asked participants to evaluate several situations in an ancient and modern context, such as avoiding a predator in the ancient situation and an attacker in the modern or finding food for yourself by gathering plants in the ancient and simply going to the grocery store in the modern. After being presented with either the modern or the ancient scenario, they were given a list of words to rate in terms of their usefulness to them. Several other controls and rating tasks were employed for comparison and ruling out purposes.

      The central idea to this research is that humans remember things in terms of the ancestral condition better because our brains were evolved and groomed for this purpose. However, as seen in the rating tasks, where participants were asked to rate both the modern and ancient scenario in terms of how familiar or how interesting it was to them, the modern condition was seen as more familiar, and the details of everyday things are allowed to slip through the cracks of our minds. Going to the grocery story is familiar and commonplace, we don't remember the details of a real trip to the store anymore than one would assume we'd remember the details of an imagined one. But a trip to grasslands of a foreign land? How often does our modern day mind find itself there? Even a modern condition that is less common, like being stalked by an attacker will leave less of an impression, either due the fact we're overrun with television programming about this topic that has desensitized us or that a modern day human can easily think of the numerous modern day advances used to protect themselves (i.e. A gun, the police). At least to myself, the modern condition is something we deal with everyday, real or imaginary, so we already have the answers, why remember the details? The ancient condition is something further from our modern day world, how to make a spear, how to figure out what plants to eat. It's possible the ancient condition is more easily recalled because it's more foreign to our modern mind rather than the modern condition is forgotten due to our ancient mind.

      This research supports the theory that our mind has a stone-age component which will cause our memory to recall more when placed in the context in which it was originally evolved in. This article supports the current theory of fitness value assessment and supports the theory that our minds are still primed to survive in the ancient world, rather than the modern. However, as mentioned previously , it's possible the ancient world is just more interesting and different to the modern mind and therefore more easily remembered.