Adaptive Education: Learning and Remembering with a Stone-Age Brain

Abstract

Educators generally accept that basic learning and memory processes are a product of evolution, guided by natural selection. Less well accepted is the idea that ancestral selection pressures continue to shape modern memory functioning. In this article, I review evidence suggesting that attention to nature’s criterion—the enhancement of fitness—is needed to explain fully how and why people remember. Thinking functionally about memory, and adopting an evolutionary perspective in the laboratory, has led to recent discoveries with clear implications for learning in the classroom. For example, our memory systems appear to be tuned to animacy (the distinction between living and nonliving things) which, in turn, can play a role in enhancing foreign language acquisition. Effective learning management systems need to align with students’ prior knowledge, skill, and interest levels, but also with the inherent content biases or “tunings” that are representative of all people.

Survival processing effect in memory under semantic divided attention.

“…Divided attention may hinder distinctive item-specific rich encoding or relational encoding that might be involved in survival processing (Burns et al, 2011). It should be noted that the absence of the survival processing effect in divided attention does not necessarily rule out the ultimate evolutionary account (e.g., Nairne & Pandeirada, 2008, 2010). It is possible that evolutionary fitness-related memory adaptation might occur through the recruitment of basic resource-demanding cognitive processes such as semantic processing (Nairne & Pandeirada, 2016).…”

“…This survival mnemonic effect has been attributed to an ultimate mechanism , which assumes that our memory systems evolved adaptively to prioritize information that is processed in relevance to one’s survival or fitness from an evolutionary perspective (Kazanas & Altarriba, 2015; Nairne & Pandeirada, 2008, 2010, 2016). In this view, this memory advantage is a natural consequence of evolutionarily determined modules in the brain, shaped to reflect the survival priorities of our ancestors, and thus specialized for remembering survival-relevant information.…”

The Survival Effect in Memory: Does It Hold into Old Age and Non-Ancestral Scenarios?

“…The survival effect in memory refers to a memory advantage for information processed in a survival-related context. It has been consistently demonstrated with young adults in an emerging body of studies [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. In these studies, participants encoded unrelated words by rating how each word was relevant to a survival scenario (e.g., stranded in foreign grasslands) versus a control scenario (e.g., moving to a foreign land) or using other effective encoding strategies (e.g., rating for self-relevance or pleasantness).…”

Pseudo-Contamination and Memory: Is There a Memory Advantage for Objects Touched by “Morphologically Deviant People”?

“…According to the adaptive memory view, memory was not crafted to learn all types of items equally well (Nairne, 2010 , 2015 , 2016 ; Nairne & Pandeirada, 2008 ) but has been shaped to retain fitness-relevant stimuli better than non-fitness-relevant stimuli (Bonin & Bugaiska, 2014 ; Nairne et al, 2007 , 2008 ). In favor of this view, it has been shown that information about dangerous animals is retained better than information about non-dangerous animals (Barrett & Broesch, 2012 ; Prokop & Fančovičová, 2017 ).…”