Survival processing effect at the metacognitive level: From a social cognitive perspective

Memory systems are proposed to serve an adaptive function such that survival-related information is retrieved better compared to information not related to survival, named the Survival Processing Effect (SPE). Humans, however, are not passive information processors. We also evaluate how confident we are in our decisions, i.e., we form metacognitive evaluations. Additionally, as social animals, we encode and retrieve information in the presence of others. I propose in my thesis that, while it may be adaptive to remember survival related information, the evaluation of the accuracy of this information s also has fitness importance. Further, this mechanism is subject to social influences depending on the context. In my thesis, I present 3 different studies investigating this proposal. The study reported in Chapter 2 consists of 2 experiments asking if the SPE extends to the metacognitive system. Participants in both experiments rated a series of words for their usefulness either in a survival scenario or a moving scenario. The experiments ended with a surprise recognition task, where participants provided confidence ratings after each answer. Findings showed that the SPE does not extend to the metacognitive system; metacognition was impartial to survival-related information. The study presented in Chapter 3 serves as a follow up using indirect confidence assessments which also include The procedure of the study was the same as the study reported in Chapter 2, with one modification. Instead of asking explicit confidence assessments in the surprise recognition task, participants bet on their answers, which is an indirect way of expressing confidence. Results of the experiment were in line with the results of Chapter 2, showing that SPE does not extend to the metacognitive system. This is possibly due to metacognitive system being domain-general which includes complex cognitive processes thus escaping bias. The study reported in Chapter 4 investigated when completing a task in dyads, whether people would encode their partner's information in survival contexts. Participants rated a series of words for their usefulness either in a survival or a moving scenario, both alone and in dyads with a confederate. Both participant and confederate were assigned one of the three semantic categories and responded to their assigned category while ignoring the third unassigned category. Results of a surprise recall test showed that participants recalled items belonging to their partner's category more than the items from the unassigned category, what is called the joint memory effect. Importantly, this effect was larger in the survival group as participants remembered as many items from their partner's category as from their own category. Increased encoding of social information under survival contexts, an instance of social information hoarding, may serve an adaptive function especially when two individuals need to act together to survive. Overall, this thesis provides a deeper understanding of the SPE examining it both at the metacognitive level and from a social-cognitive perspective.