Adaptive Memory Essay

The aim of this particular study was to research adaptive memory and attempt how best to explain how this â€Å"adaptive memory† works. In this experiment 252 first year students were the participants. According to which tutorial group they were in, the participants were given a scenario, with the scenarios being: * Ancestral Hunter * Modern Hunter * Future Hunter Both the Ancestral and Future hunter scenarios contained 80 participants while 92 were placed in the Modern Hunter group. Participants were asked to read a scenario according to which group they were placed in (i. e. Modern scenario for Modern Hunter group etc) following this they were asked to read and rate a list of thirty-five words based on their relevance to their scenario. This list of words was shown on a screen for five seconds each. Following this exercise, participants were then asked to complete a number task in which they were given a list of twelve numbers, each being a seven digit number, where each number was shown on the screen for one second. See more: Sleep Deprivation Problem Solution Speech Essay After this, participants were given ten minutes to attempt to recall as many words as possible from the original thirty-five words they had rated. The results showed encoding was most effective for the future hunter scenario. Introduction. A proposition made by evolutionary psychologists is that our cognitive processes have been shaped and tuned by way of adaptation. One situation is that of survival. The ultimate goal is for humans to survive and reproduce, because of this humans have adapted and evolved to heighten their senses in a situation where their survival is threatened. Items can be processed more deeply and remembered for longer when the context of the word given, seems to be a scenario in which the mind believes it needs to actively fight for its own survival. One of the most interesting findings into this theory is the results of Nairne, Thompson and Panderiada’s (2007) experiment. The findings of their experiment revealed life of an encoding task that results in higher levels of free recall than those found with past tested methods. The theory of levels of processing framework states that retention of the given word varies in relation to the depth of which the word in question is processed (Craik & Tulving, 1975). The series of experiments performed by Craik and Tulving found that the participants would process a word better when matching to a related question. This experiment attempts to find how adaptive memory can be best explained. Three different scenarios were used to encode a list of words. It is hypothesised that the scenario in which survival is the ultimate goal, is where the words will be more salient and hence acquire a higher retention of the words listed. Method. Participants were 252 first year undergraduate students undertaking psychology at the University of New South Wales. The experiment was completed during tutorials as a group experiment. The experiments took place according to the tutorial group, and were not performed at the same time. Design. The independent variables in this experiment were the scenarios given to the participants and the list of words and numbers presented to participants after they had completed the scenario. Materials and Design. Stimuli used were 35 concrete nouns selected at random from a list of words which were generated by submitting a range of 400-700 for frequency, concreteness, imageability and meaningfulness criteria in MRC Psycholinguistic Database and twelve seven digit numbers. Procedure. Depending on which tutorial group the student was in, participants were asked to read a survival scenario. In total there were three different scenarios given; Ancestral Hunter, Modern Hunter and Future Hunter. After the participant read through the given scenario they were asked to rate a list of 35 words for relevance. Each word was shown on a screen for a total of five seconds. Following this memory task, the students were then shown 12 seven-digit numbers on the screen, each number being shown for ten seconds. After being presented all twelve, they were given ten seconds to list as many numbers as they could remember. Following this task they were given ten minutes to attempt to recall as many words as possible from the list of thirty-five words given to them to rate after each scenario.