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The authors conclude that four well-established domain-general mechanisms of human memory—memorial benefits caused by (1) arousal, (2) item congruity, (3) richness of encoding, and (4) the combination of single-item and relational processing—have proven successful in accounting for many results on moderators and mediators of the SPE. In contrast, hypotheses attributing the SPE to the operation of domain-specific, evolutionarily acquired “cognitive modules” tailored to solve specific adaptive problems our ancestors faced in Pleistocene environments (i.e., survival modules or planning modules) were less successful.

Past research showed the robust effect of survival processing in several undergraduate samples. Recently, this effect was also demonstrated in children (Aslan & Bäuml, 2012; Otgaar & Smeets, 2010). To our knowledge, the present study is the first to illustrate the survival recall effect in childhood trauma victims. The present study was the first to examine the influence of rating words according to an abuse scenario, a new (i.e., not used in previous studies) scenario that could also be viewed as a form of survival and potentially inducing self-referential processing in people with a history of abuse. The present data illustrate the adaptive role of the memory system in people with a history of trauma.

Recent research has shown that when lists of words are processed for their relevance to a survival scenario (e.g., stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land), true memory performance is higher than when the same words are processed for a number of other, well-known meaningful or deep processing scenarios (e.g., moving to a new house, rating for pleasantness, self-reference) (for a review, see Nairne, 2010). This phenomenon, known as the adaptive memory effect, is said to showcase the human memory system’s proclivity toward more efficient processing of information for its survival relevance, something that may permit better adaptation to our environment.

Although a structural stance can produce significant advances in our understanding of cognitive systems, functionless tinkering often leads to directionless research or to theoretical frameworks designed to explain tasks rather than psychological processes (Nairne, 2005; Klein et al., 2002). As William James once said, it is difficult to understand a house by focusing on its bricks and mortar—one needs to know what the house is for, what the house is designed to do, and it is only in this functional context that bricks and mortar make sense. Identifying the adaptive problems that our memory systems evolved to solve provides just such a functional context in which structural investigations of remembering potentially make sense.

Memory allows us to think back about past episodes, such as witnessing a crime, but also to mentally plan prospective contingencies that can aid us in our future plans, such as avoiding the location where the crime took place. As memory scientists, we should attend both to the functions of memory as well as to the processes that permit optimal performance. An issue that has been receiving increasing attention is the question about how and why our memory evolved. Although surely function follows from evolution, it may not always be the case that current function stems directly from natural selection. This makes the issue of addressing evolutionary questions in human memory fraught with difficulties.

Evaluating words for survival relevance leads to better free recall than many common encoding strategies (Nairne & Pandeirada, 2011). We addressed if survival processing advantages would generalize to paired-associate learning by asking participants to evaluate word pairs, either Swahili–English (e.g., duara–wheel) or Lithuanian–English (e.g., karalius–king) under survival processing instructions or other encoding instructions. In Experiment 1, recall did not vary across conditions. In Experiments 2, 3 and 4, pleasantness judgments led to improved cued recall relative to survival processing. Survival processing improves free recall of lists but not paired-associate learning. This suggests that the survival processing instructions promote relational learning among items but not associative learning within pairs.