Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - 3pm, JS Coon Bldg, Room 250

James Nairne
Reece McGee Distinguished Professor
Purdue University

http://www1.psych.purdue.edu/~nairne/home.html

"Adaptive Memory: Evolutionary Influences on Remembering"

If memory evolved, sculpted by the processes of natural selection, then its operating characteristics likely bear the “footprints” of ancestral selection pressures. Given nature’s criterion—enhancing inclusive fitness—our memory systems are likely biased or “tuned” to retain information that is fitness-relevant. Data consistent with this claim include: (1) processing information for its survival relevance leads to superior long-term retention—better, in fact, than most known learning techniques, (2) animate (living) stimuli are remembered much better than inanimate (nonliving) stimuli, and (3) stimuli that have been potentially contaminated by disease are remembered especially well. Understanding how memory is used to solve adaptive problems relevant to fitness provides critical insight into how and why human memory systems formed, and why they work the way they do.