Abstract: According to evolutionary psychologists, an evolved psychological mechanism exists in the form that it does because it solved a specific problem of survival or reproduction recurrently over evolutionary history. Recently, several groups of researchers have reported survival processing advantages of memory by using the survival processing paradigm. This survival recall advantage has been replicated with numerous control conditions intended to match the survival context in terms of novelty, arousal, and media exposure. Taking together, the findings of these studies seem to indicate that survival-relevant processing results in superior memorability. Firstly, the definition and research paradigm of the survival processing advantages effect were introduced in this article. In the original study of Nairne et al. (2007) using the survival processing paradigm, participants were asked to rate lists of words on the basis of their relevance in one of these two scenarios: survival in the grasslands of a foreign land (survival scenario) or moving to a new home in a foreign land (moving scenario), and in an additional condition, participants are simply asked to rate the pleasantness of the words (pleasantness scenario). After the rating task, they were told to proceed a distractor task, and finally, they were presented with a surprise free recall test. The results showed that participants demonstrated superior memory for the words rated in a survival scenario. This finding suggests that our memory systems might be tuned to remember information that is relevant to survival during the long-term evolution process. Secondly, other possible proximate mechanisms and arguments relating to survival advantages were addressed. Most of previous studies have showed that the mnemonic advantage of survival processing cannot be merely attributed to any item-specific or schematic memory processing, and suggests that the advantage reflects an adaptive bias that is activated when participants rate the words in a survival scenario. While Otgaar et al.’s (2010) study showed that both true and false recall are amplified by survival processing. Moreover, Burns et al. (2011) found that congruity between target items and processing tasks might contribute, at least partly, to the mnemonic advantages typically produced by survival processing. Finally, several promising directions for further research were put forward: 1) effect of survival processing advantage should be replicated when possibly problematic properties of the materials were controlled and equated across conditions; 2) researchers could find specific brain areas related to the advantage of survival processing, using fMRI technique; 3) in addition to survival, social exchange is another adaptive problem human ancestors involved, therefore, the mnemonic advantage could be tested in social exchange processing.

Key words: memory, survival processing advantages effect, survival processing paradigm

摘要： 近年来，一些研究者使用生存加工范式来研究记忆，并发现了记忆的生存加工优势效应。本文首先介绍生存加工优势效应的含义及其研究范式，然后介绍生存优势产生的可能原因，即在长期的进化过程中，记忆的机制是为了解决人类祖先的适应性问题而设计的，因此产生记忆的生存优势效应。同时，还分析了记忆生存加工优势效应产生的其他可能原因以及对生存优势效应的争论。最后提出了今后需要进一步研究的问题。

关键词: 记忆, 生存加工优势效应, 生存加工范式