The Survival Processing Effect with Intentional Learning of Ad Hoc Categories

Previous studies have shown that memory is adapted to remember information when it is processed in a survival context. This study investigates how procedural changes in Marinho (2012) study might have led to her failure to replicate the survival mnemonic advantage. In two between-subjects design experiments, participants were instructed to learn words from ad hoc categories and to rate their relevance to a survival or a control scenario. No survival advantage was obtained in either experiment. The Adjusted Ratio of Clustering (ARC) scores revealed that including the category labels made the participants rely more on the category structure of the list. Various procedural aspects of the conducted experiments are discussed as possible reasons underlying the absence of the survival effect.