Abstract
When words are processed for their fitness-relevance (e.g., for finding food), they are remembered better than when they are processed for non-fitness issues (e.g., for their pleasantness): the survival processing advantage. In the present research, we investigated memory performance as a function of the level of relevance of words (high versus low) to survival issues (e.g., avoiding predators). In Study 1, a sample of French adults had to rate 732 words on the survival problems of “avoiding predators”, “avoiding contamination” or “finding food and water”. Reliability measures were computed for the ratings and descriptive statistical analyses and bivariate correlations as well as multiple linear regression analyses were performed. The entire set of survival ratings is available as Supplemental Material. Three experiments were then conducted using the collected ratingsto investigate whether the survival processing advantage in memory was moderated by the relation between relevance ratings (high versus low relevance) and survival contexts (“predation” [Experiment 1], “contamination” [Experiment 2], “food and water” [Experiment 3]). Words of high survival relevance were recalled better when encoded either for survival or for pleasantness. Furthermore, a larger survival processing advantage was found for words rated high on survival-related dimensions than for words rated in the pleasantness (control) condition.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
A word was coded as animate when it referred to a living thing that was able to propel itself autonomously. This broad definition of animacy has often been used in the literature on animacy effects in memory (e.g., Gelin et al., 2019). The coding was done by the three authors of the current paper and there were only a few words for which the classification did not match. These cases were discussed and a consensus was easily reached for each of them.
Seven words could not be unambiguously classified as animates or inanimates and were excluded from the analyses.
Note that the VIF for context familiarity was 2.86 and was the second highest value of its type.
The computations were done with G*Power (Version 3.1.9.7, Faul et al., 2007).
Experiment 1 took place just after an acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in France, a period during which it was particularly difficult to recruit participants. However, with this number of participants included in Experiment 1, a priori power at the alpha level of .05 was .79 in a unilateral test, a value which was very close to our objective of having a power of .8.
In order to describe the changes in the original scores (and not in the within-subjects metric, which depends on difference scores), all the reported δ were computed as the ratio of the difference between the observed means over the square root of the mean square error obtained as if a between-participants design had been used (see, e.g. Kline, 2013, p. 199).
Two concerns can be raised regarding the observation of a potentially larger survival effect at lower than at higher relevance ratings in certain of the Kroneisen et al. (2014, 2016) studies that are comparable to ours. First of all, a close examination of the studies by Kroneisen et al. (2014, 2016) in which the survival effect was the highest for words rated as being least relevant reveals that the mean relevance ratings were close to the center of the rating scale (= 3) with relatively low standard deviations, an observation suggesting that extreme scores (e.g., 1 and 5) were given to only very few words. Second, computing a survival advantage for each relevance rating level is questionable given that, for any given word, the ratings were probably not the same in the survival condition and in the control condition, respectively (e.g., a word rated 1 (or 5) in the survival scenario is probably not rated 1 (or 5) in the control condition). Words rated 1 or 5 in one encoding condition therefore have different properties in the other encoding condition.
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The authors wish to thank Céline Capelier for her help in collecting the data, Prof Richard Ferraro, Dr Lyra Stein and three anonymous Reviewers very much for the helpful comments on a previous version of the article.
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Bonin, P., Thiebaut, G. & Méot, A. Ratings of survival-related dimensions for a set of 732 words, their relationships with other psycholinguistic variables and memory performance. Curr Psychol 43, 8200–8218 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04979-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04979-2