Running head : SURVIVAL PROCESSING IN IMPLICIT MEMORY 1

The current study was designed to investigate the survival processing effect (Nairne, Thompson, & Pandeirada, 2007) in cued implicit and explicit memory tests. The survival effect has been well established in explicit free recall and recognition tests, but has not been evident in implicit memory tests or in cued explicit tests. Experiment 1 of the current study tested implicit and explicit memory for words studied in survival, moving, or pleasantness contexts in stem completion tests. Experiment 2 further tested these effects in implicit and explicit category production tests. Across 2 experiments with 4 separate memory tasks that included a total of 525 subjects, no survival processing advantage was found, replicating results for implicit tests reported by Tse and Altarriba (2010). Thus, although the survival effect appears to be quite robust in free recall and recognition tests, this effect has not been replicated in cued implicit and explicit memory tests. The similar results found for the implicit and explicit tests in the current study do not support encoding elaboration explanations of the survival processing effect. In the past several years, numerous studies have reported a memory advantage for items processed for relevance in an evolutionary survival scenario as compared with many classic encoding tasks that typically enhance memory (e.g., pleasantness rating, self-referential processing, imagery). The motivation for such studies has been to examine an adaptive approach to memory functioning. Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007) suggested that memory processes developed to aid in remembering fitness-relevant information. They argued that memory processes likely evolved to help us solve basic problems such as hunting and gathering food, finding water and shelter, and evading and protecting ourselves from predators. They hypothesized that processing information for its relevance to survival in an ancestral grasslands scenario should provide a memory advantage compared with other types of processing, because relevance to survival is consistent with the proposed function of memory. In four experiments, Nairne et al. (2007) compared survival processing with numerous other encoding tasks, including rating relevance to a moving scenario that did not involve survival, a pleasantness rating task, and a self-reference rating task. In all of their experiments, a memory advantage was found for the survival processing task compared to the other encoding tasks in free recall and recognition memory tests. Nairne et al. concluded from these results SURVIVAL PROCESSING IN IMPLICIT MEMORY 4 that it is possible to test a priori hypotheses regarding an …