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Adaptive Memory: Story Processing Improves Recall Performance

delete2026-01-01
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PRE
AI
R
Reysen, Matthew B. *
F
Fischer, Zoe H.
DOI:10.1177/14747049261421967delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Across four experiments, participants were asked to process unrelated common nouns after listening to pleasantness processing instructions, survival processing instructions, or story processing instructions. In Experiment 1, participants were provided with a list of words and were asked to list various ways that the words were pleasant or unpleasant, list ways that the words could help them survive in an ancestral grasslands scenario, or use the words in the list to create a short story. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to perform similar tasks, but rather than being provided with a word list at the start of the experiment, words were presented one at a time at a fixed rate. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to rate words as they were presented one at a time regarding their perceived pleasantness, their relevance to an ancestral survival scenario, or the ease with which they could be included in a short story. In Experiment 4, a combined survival-story condition was included along with survival, story, and pleasantness processing instructions to determine whether combining story and survival processing produces an additive effect on recall performance. Across all four experiments, after a brief delay, the story processing condition produced either enhanced or comparable incidental recall performance to the survival processing scenario, and both of those conditions produced enhanced recall performance relative to the pleasantness processing scenario. These results suggest that processing information in the context of a story, like survival processing, may represent one of the best deep processing tasks identified to date.
Keywords:
mnemonics
recall
short-term memory
survival processing

Journal

E
Evolutionary Psychology
IF:
0.9
Papers:
17
Citations:
1.2K

Organization

U
university of mississippi
Scholars:
1.2K
Papers: 541
Citations: 0
Cited Papers

Cited Papers

Adaptive Memory
err2008-02-01
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PREAI
errJames S. Nairne; Josefa N.S. Pandeirada; Sarah R. Thompson
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A meta-analysis of the survival-processing advantage in memory
err2017-07-25
err39
errOAAI
errScofield, John E.; Buchanan, Erin M.; Kostic, Bogdan
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Can survival processing enhance story memory? Testing the generalizability of the adaptive memory framework.
err2012-01-01
err0
PREAI
errJohn G. Seamon; Justin M. Bohn; Inslee E. Coddington; Maritza C. Ebling; Ethan M. Grund; Catherine T. Haring; Sue-Jung Jang; Daniel Kim; Christopher Liong; Frances M. Paley; Luke K. Pang; Ashik H. Siddique
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