Conference Presentations by James Nairne
Adaptive memory: Animacy effects persist in paired-associate foreign language learning
Papers by James Nairne
Adaptive Memory: Is Memory "Tuned" for Hunting and Gathering?
PsycEXTRA Dataset
Memory, 2014
Recent evidence suggests that animate stimuli are remembered better than matched inanimate stimul... more Recent evidence suggests that animate stimuli are remembered better than matched inanimate stimuli. Two experiments tested whether this animacy effect persists in paired-associate learning of foreign words. Experiment 1 randomly paired Swahili words with matched animate and inanimate English words. Participants were told simply to learn the English "translations" for a later test. Replicating earlier findings using free recall, a strong animacy advantage was found in this cued-recall task. Concerned that the effect might be due to enhanced accessibility of the individual responses (e.g., animates represent a more accessible category), Experiment 2 selected animate and inanimate English words from two more constrained categories (four-legged animals and furniture). Once again, an advantage was found for pairs using animate targets. These results argue against organisational accounts of the animacy effect and potentially have implications for foreign language vocabulary learning.
Adaptive Education: Learning and Remembering with a Stone-Age Brain
Educational Psychology Review
The Three "Ws" of Episodic Memory: What, When, and Where
The American journal of psychology, 2015
At its core, episodic memory requires the encoding and retention of occurrence information. One n... more At its core, episodic memory requires the encoding and retention of occurrence information. One needs to remember that a particular item occurred (what) at a particular time (when) in a particular place (where). These task requirements are scale independent, meaning that they hold regardless of whether one is asked to remember over the short or the long-term. In the present article, written to honor the contributions of Alice Healy, I review evidence suggesting that the benchmark phenomena of short-term memory, including bow-shaped serial position curves, symmetric error gradients, and even our limited memory span, actually arise from processes associated with the recovery of occurrence information. Rather than reflecting the properties of a special short-term storage system, these signature empirical patterns are characteristic of remembering over almost any time scale. More generally, I argue that occurrence information can be conceptualized as stored values along largely independ...
A framework for interpreting recency effects in immediate serial recall
Memory & Cognition, 1988
Three experiments investigated the mnemonic ef-fects of source-constrained retrieval in the survi... more Three experiments investigated the mnemonic ef-fects of source-constrained retrieval in the survival-processing paradigm. Participants were asked to make survival-based or control decisions (pleasantness or moving judgments) about items prior to a source identification test. The source test was followed by a surprise free recall test for all items processed during the experiment, including the new items (foils) pre-sented during the source test. For the source test itself, when asked about the content of prior processing—did you make a survival or a pleasantness decision about this item?—no dif-ferences were found between the survival and control condi-tions. The final free recall data revealed a different pattern: When participants were asked to decide whether an item had been processed previously for survival, that item was subse-quently recalled better than when the source query asked about pleasantness or relevance to a moving scenario. This mnemonic boost occurred across-the-bo...
We recently proposed that human memory systems are ‘‘tuned’’ to remember information that is proc... more We recently proposed that human memory systems are ‘‘tuned’’ to remember information that is processed for survival, perhaps as a result of fitness advantages accrued in the ancestral past. This proposal was supported by experiments in which participants showed superior memory when words were rated for survival relevance, at least relative to when words received other forms of deep processing. The current experiments tested the mettle of survival memory by pitting survival processing against conditions that are universally accepted as producing excellent retention, including conditions in which participants rated words for imagery, pleasantness, and self-reference; participants also generated words, studied words with the intention of learning them, or rated words for relevance to a contextually rich (but non-survival-related) scenario. Survival processing yielded the best retention, which suggests that it may be one of the best encoding procedures yet discovered in the memory field...
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Four experiments investigated the mnemonic effects of generating survival situations. People were... more Four experiments investigated the mnemonic effects of generating survival situations. People were given target words and asked to generate survival situations involving that stimulus (e.g., DOOR: "I'm in a house that's on fire, and I can escape through the door"). No constraints were placed on the generation process, other than it must be survival-related and refer to the target stimulus. Following a series of these generation trials people were given a surprise retention test for the target words. Across four experiments the survival generation task produced significantly better retention than several deep processing controls including: (1) a pleasantness-rating task, (2) an autobiographical retrieval task, and (3) a task that required people to generate unusual uses for the target items. These results demonstrate the power of survival processing in a new way and provide diagnostic information about the proximate mechanisms that may underlie survival processing advantages. They also extend the generality of survival processing beyond the standard relevance-rating procedure that has been used in virtually all prior research.
Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior
According to the adaptive memory perspective, memory should function more efficiently in fitness-... more According to the adaptive memory perspective, memory should function more efficiently in fitness-relevant domains. The current work explored whether there is a mnemonic tuning in a fundamental domain for human evolution: reproduction. In two experiments, female participants assessed how desirable potential male candidates (represented by a face and a short descriptor) would be in the context of a long-term mating relationship or in the context of a long-term work relationship. Then, after a short distractor task, participants performed a recognition task for the faces and a source memory task. Finally, they were asked to recall the descriptors presented during encoding. Experiment 1 used a between-subjects design, whereas Experiment 2 employed a within-subject design. In both experiments, participants remembered the faces best when they were encoded in the mating condition. Also, in Experiment 1, source memory performance was better in the mating condition than in the working condit...
Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology
Ostracism-being excluded and ignored-is a pervasive phenomenon that occurs in a variety of contex... more Ostracism-being excluded and ignored-is a pervasive phenomenon that occurs in a variety of contexts and cultures throughout the world. Diary studies indicate it occurs on a daily basis. Ostracism is painful and distressing psychologically to the person experiencing it, even when it is innocuous and brief. Researchers argue humans evolved detection systems so that individuals can accurately detect and avoid ostracism. Several forms of evidence needed to support a psychological adaptation, such as cross-cultural, hunter-gather, medical, phylogenetic, and physiological evidence, support this adaptation argument. However, direct experimental evidence that appropriate detecting (and responding to) ostracism promotes nature's criteria (i.e., solves fitness-relevant problems focused on survival and reproduction) would help bolster the case for an adaptation. We review the extant literature through the framework of nature's criteria, and then propose that direct experimental tests of ostracism detection using research methods from evolutionary psychology and animal models will both add further support to an adaptation argument, and offer fruitful ways of approaching unanswered questions in this research area.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2017
Human cognition is sensitive to the distinction between living and nonliving things. Animacy play... more Human cognition is sensitive to the distinction between living and nonliving things. Animacy plays a role in language comprehension, reasoning, the organization of knowledge, and perception. Although ignored until recently, animacy significantly influences basic memory processes as well. Recent research has indicated that people remember animate targets better than matched inanimate targets; in fact, an item’s animacy status is one of the best predictors of its later recall. Animate processing of inanimate stimuli can produce retention advantages, as can animate touching—inanimate objects are remembered better when they are simply touched by animate things. We discuss these recent findings and their implications for the evolution of cognition, the methodology of memory experiments, and educational practice.
Journal of Memory and Language, 2017
Processing items for their survival relevance often produces a robust memory advantage. The curre... more Processing items for their survival relevance often produces a robust memory advantage. The current experiments assessed possible proximate mechanisms responsible for this advantage by assessing output strategies during free recall. Previous research has shown that item clustering during recall can provide diagnostic information about the structure of representations in episodic memory, particularly the encoding of temporal, semantic, and source information. Following survival processing and moving or pleasantness controls, measures of temporal and semantic clustering were generated. A robust recall advantage was found for survival processing, but no evidence for temporal clustering was detected. Above-chance levels of semantic clustering were obtained, but there were no differences between the survival and control conditions. An additional clustering measure based on scenario-based relevance ratings also failed to explain recall differences, as did absolute and relative measures of remembered temporal position. Our results indicate that neither enhanced temporal coding nor increased semantic processing among the items on the study list can easily explain the oft-replicated survival processing advantage. Our results also suggest that the ubiquitous temporal clustering patterns seen in free recall studies may be a product, in part, of using intentional learning and multiple study trials.
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Conference Presentations by James Nairne
Papers by James Nairne