Survival processing occupies the central bottleneck of cognitive processing: A psychological refractory period analysis

Abstract

Words judged for relevance in a survival situation are remembered better than words judged for relevance in a nonsurvival context. This survival processing effect has been explained by selective tuning of human memory during evolution to process and retain information specifically relevant for survival. According to the richness-of-encoding hypothesis the survival processing effect arises from a domain-general mechanism-namely, a particularly rich and distinct form of encoding. This form of information processing is effortful and requires limited cognitive capacities. In our experiment, we used the well-established psychological refractory period framework in conjunction with the effect propagation logic to assess the role of central cognitive resources for the survival processing effect. Our data demonstrate that the survival memory advantage indeed relies on the capacity-limited central stage of cognitive processing. Thus, rating words in the context of a survival scenario involves central processing resources to a greater amount than rating words in a nonsurvival control condition. We discuss implications for theories of the survival processing effect.

Keywords: Bottleneck model; Dual tasks; Effect propagation; PRP; Survival processing.

Fig. 1

Illustration of the central bottleneck model and idealized predictions for RTs: a Processing of Task 1 and Task 2 for short and long SOA (stimulus onset asynchrony). b Processing of the survival versus the moving relevance rating (Task 1) and a tone classification task (Task 2) in the present experiment. For further explanations, please see the text. (P = precentral [perceptual] stage; C = central stage; M = postcentral [motor] stage)

Fig. 2

Mean proportions of correct recall for each scenario, separately for rating categories. Error bars indicate standard errors of the mean

Fig. 3

Mean (correct) RTs in milliseconds (ms) for the relevance rating task (Task 1) and the tone classification task (Task 2) as a function of stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA in ms) and scenario. Errors bars are standard errors of the means