Survival value in spatial memory: a pilot study

In the survival processing paradigm, participants are asked to rate the relevance of information in a survival scenario. The survival scenario consistently provides advantages compared to control scenarios, benefiting delayed recall and recognition. This has also been shown for object-location memory. Nairne et al. (2012) asked participants to imagine themselves stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land and to rate how difficult it would be to collect food items shown on a computer screen in different locations. Then, participants had to recall where they believed the food item had occurred. Participants exposed to the survival scenario showed better location memory. Costanzi et al. (2019) showed that emotions improve spatial memory performance when emotional and neutral stimuli compete for access to the working memory system using an object-relocation task with emotional and neutral pictures overlapping the objects to relocate. We aimed to explore whether the spatial memory advantage also occurs for incidentally learned survival stimuli. In this first experiment, we used the object relocation task developed by Costanzi et al. (2019), replacing emotional stimuli with pictures of food items as in Nairne et al. (2012). One hundred and sixty-nine college students executed an object-relocation task with food (survival) or everyday objects (non-survival) pictures or both (competition) overlapping the objects to relocate. Two hours later, they performed a forced-choice recognition test. We found no significant differences between groups in the recognition task. Unlike previous data on emotional stimuli, no advantage for survival items was found in the competition condition. However, we found that the performance at the object-relocation task was significantly better in the group tested with only survival stimuli than in the group tested with non-survival items. Results are discussed in terms of working memory processing of survival items.