Adaptive memory: fitness relevance and the hunter-gatherer mind.

Recent studies suggest that human memory systems are "tuned" to remember information that is processed in terms of its fitness value. When people are asked to rate the relevance of words to a survival scenario, performance on subsequent surprise memory tests exceeds that obtained after most other known encoding techniques. The present experiments explored this effect using survival scenarios designed to mimic the division of labor thought to characterize early hunter-gatherer societies.