Is there a survival processing effect in metacognition?

Psychological Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-022-01782-9 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Is there a survival processing effect in metacognition? Dilan Çabuk1 · Alper Yelimlieş1 · Çağlar Akçay1,2 · Terry Eskenazi1 Received: 13 April 2022 / Accepted: 13 December 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2022 Abstract Memory systems serve an adaptive function for the fitness of organisms. A good example of this is the Survival Processing Effect (SPE) which points to increased retention of information when it is processed in a survival context compared to other contexts. Survival processing may also affect metacognitive processes, by increasing confidence judgments as well as increasing metacognitive sensitivity. No previous study, however, has directly examined whether processing information for survival also has an effect on metacognitive processes. Here we ask whether SPE extends to the metacognitive system in terms of both metacognitive sensitivity and confidence bias. In Experiment 1 participants were asked to rate a list of words in terms of relevance in a survival scenario or a moving scenario. In a surprise old/new recognition test, they were given one word at a time and asked to indicate if they have rated the presented word before and state how confident they are in that choice. Surprisingly, the results did not reveal a SPE, which may have been due to high overall performance in the recognition task. In Experiment 2 we increased the level of difficulty of the memory task, which resulted in a robust SPE, but could not find this effect in metacognitive monitoring. Together, these results suggest that survival processing may not affect metacognitive processes in a reliable fashion. Introduction Memory systems, including human memory, are likely to have evolved to enhance fitness of the individual by increasing the chances of survival and reproduction (Kazanas & Altarriba, 2015; Nairne & Pandeirada, 2016). Given that some information, such as location of food or predators, carries higher fitness-related value, the storage and retrieval of such information may be more efficient compared to other information. Consistent with this idea, previous studies showed that encoding information in a survival context, where information is evaluated based on their survival value, increases retrieval of this information, termed the survival processing effect (Burns et al., 2014; Nairne & Pandeirada, 2010; Nairne et al., 2007). In addition to increasing recall and recognition performance, survival processing may also be expected to prevent false memories (Otgaar & Smeets, 2010). False memories * Dilan Çabuk 1 Department of Psychology, Koç University, Rumelifeneri Yolu, Sariyer, 34450 Istanbul, Turkey 2 School of Life Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK are defined as the memory trace of an experience that in fact did not happen or remembering it in a different way than the fact (Roediger & McDermott, 1995) and can arise due to various factors, including inferences that a person makes regarding the event (Roediger & McDermott, 1995), which can be influenced by interference of events that happened afterward (e.g., Loftus et al., 1978, Schooler et al. 1990, Goff et al. 1998, Tversky et al. 2000), sleep deprivation (Chatburn et al., 2017), and similarity between to be remembered information (Coane et al., 2021), or general metacognitive beliefs about how memory works (Mazzoni & Kirsch, 2002). In a study that investigated if survival processing acts as a safeguard against false memories, Howe and Derbish (2010) compared recall rates after words were rated either for their survival value or, in the control condition, for their pleasantness. Contrary to predictions, they found that survival processing resulted in higher false memories compared to the control condition. Similarly, Otgaar and Smeets (2010) found that when given a recognition test after rating relevance of words to a survival or a house-moving (control) scenario, survival processing resulted in not only higher true recall performance but also in higher false memories in both adult participants and children. Taken together, these findings suggest that survival processing effect, while enhancing 13 Vol.:(0123456789) Psychological Research retrieval of information overall, may also make people more prone to false memories. These findings of higher rates of false memories associated with survival processing are compatible with theories focusing on activation spread between associated items stored in memory (Otgaar & Smeets, 2010). These theories state that an increase in true recall comes with an increase in false memories due to the activation spread along the memory networks which causes related but not exposed items in the system to be activated. Associative Response Theory (Underwood, 1965), for instance, posits that memory system is, in fact, a network in which all components are linked semantically. Due to the connections between related components, during the encoding of a piece of information, other semantically related ones are also activated in the system. This activation, in turn, leads people to mistakenly assume that they have seen the word previously. Thus, as the activation of the words presented increases (such as when words processed in survival context are retrieved), false recognition rates also increase since the activation of related words will also increase (Anastasi et al., 2005). Although increased rates of false memories may seem to be not adaptive at first glance, they may in fact provide the person with an increased chance of survival. Previous studies, for instance, showed that false memories may be beneficial by facilitating problem solving (Howe et al., 2011) and visual identification (Otgaar et al., 2015a, 2015b). If false memories can be beneficial in certain instances, then one may ask if they have an adaptive value in survival contexts. Indeed, Howe and Derbish (2010) argued that incorrectly remembering the presence of a survival threat (such as a predator) in a location may alert the individual to be particularly cautious, ultimately protecting them from any possible threat in that location. The idea that some errors are less costly than others has been formalized by Error Management Theory (EMT) (Haselton & Buss, 2000). Under this theory, decisions under ambiguous circumstances are made in a way to balance the trade-off between costs and benefits (Johnson et al., 2013), and natural selection favors biases that result in the least costly error in case of an asymmetry between the costs of false positives and the costs of false negatives (Haselton & Buss, 2000). For example, suppose that one has to remember whether they saw a predator in a given location before or not. Remembering that there was a predator there when there was not would be a false-positive error (a.k.a Type-1 error), while forgetting about a pr (...truncated)