Dying scenarios improve recall as much as survival scenarios

Abstract

Merely contemplating one's death improves retention for entirely unrelated material learned subsequently. This "dying to remember" effect seems conceptually related to the survival processing effect, whereby processing items for their relevance to being stranded in the grasslands leads to recall superior to that of other deep processing control conditions. The present experiments directly compared survival processing scenarios with "death processing" scenarios. Results showed that when the survival and dying scenarios are closely matched on key dimensions, and possible congruency effects are controlled, the dying and survival scenarios produced equivalently high recall levels. We conclude that the available evidence (cf. Bell, Roer, & Buchner, 2013; Klein, 2012), while not definitive, is consistent with the possibility of overlapping mechanisms.

Does the thought of death contribute to the memory benefit of encoding with a survival scenario?

“…In the second study reported below, we tested what we will refer to as the "life-after-death" scenario against two different survival scenarios (ancestral and modern) and a standard deep-processing control condition, namely pleasantness. We took into consideration Burns et al (2014a) criticism of Klein's (2014) dying scenario by choosing a thematic, detailed and concrete dying condition. In the life-afterdeath scenario, the participants had to imagine that they had been informed that they were about to die having just been told that there is life after death.…”

“…It therefore remains unclear as to whether or not the mechanisms that underlie the DTR and survival effects overlap. As a result, and as acknowledged by Burns et al (2014a), more research on this issue is needed. The goal of our study was therefore to submit to further empirical tests the idea that the memory effects of survival and death thoughts are underpinned by similar mechanisms, and thus that the survival effect in memory is related to the activation of death thoughts.…”

“…Klein (2014) suggested that the recall advantage associated with survival processing was therefore not due entirely to mortality salience. However, according to Burns et al (2014a), Klein's (2014) findings regarding the mortality condition could not be optimally compared to the traditional grasslands condition, because his dying scenario was thought to be less thematic, detailed and concrete than Nairne's classic survival scenario. Thus, Burns et al (2014a) directly compared survival processing scenarios with "death processing" scenarios that were closely matched on these dimensions.…”

“…Burns and colleagues (Burns, Hart, & Kramer, 2014a;Burns, Hart, Kramer, & Burns, 2014b;Hart & Burns, 2012) claimed to have found supportive evidence for the hypothesis that processing words in relation to death and to survival are related. Indeed, in their earlier work, Hart and Burns (2012) suggested that the two effects may share underlying mechanisms.…”

“…Indeed, in their earlier work, Hart and Burns (2012) suggested that the two effects may share underlying mechanisms. According to Burns et al (2014a), if the survival and the DTR effects are underpinned by similar proximate mechanisms, the effects of mortality salience and survival processing on memory performance should be redundant. To test this hypothesis, they designed an experiment in which they manipulated both mortality salience and survival processing.…”