Adaptive Memory: Remembering Potential Mates

Adaptive Memory: Remembering Potential Mates.

According to the adaptive memory perspective, memory should function more efficiently in fitness-relevant domains. The current work explored whether there is a mnemonic tuning in a fundamental domain for human evolution: reproduction. In two experiments, female participants assessed how desirable potential male candidates (represented by a face and a short descriptor) would be in the context of...

Adaptive Memory: Evolutionary Constraints on Remembering

Human memory evolved subject to the constraints of nature’s criterion— differential survival and reproduction. Consequently, our capacity to remember and forget is likely tuned to solving fitness-based problems, particularly those prominent in the ancestral environments in which memory evolved. Do the operating characteristics of memory continue to bear the footprint of nature’s criterion? This...

Adaptive Memory: Remembering With a Stone-Age Brain

Ifmemory evolved, sculpted by the processes of natural selection, then its operating characteristics likely bear the ‘‘footprints’’ of ancestral selection pressures. Psychologists rarely consider this possibility and generally ignore functional questions in their attempt to understand how human memory works. We propose that memory evolved to enhance reproductive fitness and, accordingly, its sy...

The Study of Memory Remembering

Human Spatial Memory : Remembering Where