Meike Kroneisen

University of Koblenz and Landau · Department of Psychology (Landau)

Previous research has demonstrated that people remember negative reputational information particularly well. However, most of these experiments manipulated the type of information associated with each face, rather than manipulating the circumstances under which people learn this information. The present experiment examines the effect of the social...

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 hypothe...

Words judged for relevance in a survival situation are remembered better than words judged for relevance in a non-survival 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 hypoth...

Imagining being stranded in the grasslands of an unknown territory without basic survival materials and subsequently rating the relevance of words for this situation leads to exceptionally good memory for these words. This survival processing effect has received much attention, primarily because it has been argued to disclose the evolutionary found...

Memory has evolved to guide our decisions in the present and to prepare us for future interactions with the environment. Within the social domain, memory can help to decide with whom to cooperate. This provides a unique opportunity to study memory from a functional perspective. While several lines of research have demonstrated that many forms of re...

Previous research has demonstrated that people remember information that is (emotionally) incongruent to their expectations, but it has left open the question if this memory enhancement has also an influence on our later actions. We investigated this question in one pilot study and two experiments. In all studies, participants first interacted with...

The ‘loci method’ is a popular mnemonic device that involves visualising and recalling items at specific points along a familiar route. The loci method has been used for thousands of years, and by many successful memory athletes; yet there have been relatively few educational and clinical applications, possibly owing to empirical uncertainty. The c...

Humans preferentially remember information processed for their survival relevance, a memorial benefit known as the survival processing effect . Memory is also biased towards information associated with the prospect of reward. Given the adaptiveness of these effects, they may depend on similar mechanisms. We tested whether motivation drives both eff...

Sleep right after studying new material is more conducive to memory than a period of wakefulness. Another way to counteract forgetting is to practice retrieval: taking a test strengthens memory more effectively than restudying the material. The current work aims at investigating the interaction between sleep and testing by asking if testing adds to...

Background: Interpersonal disturbances in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have been attributed to a negativity bias in social cognition. Adding to this literature, we experimentally tested whether those with BPD show altered memory for cooperative versus non-cooperative interaction partners. Methods: In a source memory paradigm, 51 female...

After imagining being stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land without any basic survival material and rating objects with respect to their relevance in this situation, participants show superior memory performance for these objects compared to a control scenario. A possible mechanism responsible for this memory advantage is the richness and di...

It is often discussed that moral judgments are either consistent with the principle of utilitarianism or with the principle of deontology. Utilitarianism is a moral principle stating that the right act is the one that produces the best overall outcome. Deontology represents an ethical position indicating that the morality of an action depends on th...

Memories formed in the context of an imagined survival scenario are more easily remembered, but the mechanisms underlying this effect are still under debate. We investigated the neurocognitive processes underlying the survival processing effect by examining event-related potentials (ERPs) during memory encoding. Participants imagined being either s...

The survival processing effect describes the phenomenon that memory for items is better after they have been processed in the context of a fitness-related survival scenario as compared to alternative processing contexts. In the present study, we examined whether the survival processing memory advantage translates to memory for the order of processe...

Processing fluency—the subjective ease of information processing—influences a variety of judgments (e.g., judgments of familiarity, liking, and truth). A study by Laham, Alter, and Goodwin (2009) suggests that this is also true for moral judgments. More specifically, the authors found that discrepant perceptual fluency mitigates moral wrongness rat...

Research on moral decision making usually focuses on two ethical principles: the principle of utilitarianism (= morality of an action is determined by its consequences) and the principle of deontology (= morality of an action is valued according to the adherence to moral norms regardless of the consequences). Criticism on traditional moral dilemma...

Rating the relevance of words for survival in the grasslands of a foreign land often leads to a memory advantage. However, it is as yet unclear whether the survival processing effect generalizes to source memory. Here, we examined whether people have enhanced source memory for the survival context in which an item has been encountered. Participants...

A popular assumption in evolutionary psychology claims that reciprocal altruism is supported by a cognitive module that helps individuals to detect and remember cheaters. Previous studies found a source memory advantage for faces of cheaters rather than faces of cooperators. The present study examines memory for social-exchange relevant information...

Words judged for their relevance in a survival context are remembered better than words processed in non-survival contexts. This phenomenon is known as the survival processing effect. Recently, inconsistent results were reported on whether the size of the survival processing effect is affected by cognitive load. Whereas Kroneisen, Rummel, and Erdfe...

When imagining being stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land without any basic survival material, participants have a magnificent memory for words rated according their usefulness in this particular situation. This survival processing boosts memory performance more than numerous other memory enhancing techniques (Nairne, Pandeirada & Thompson,...

Enhanced memory for cheaters could be suited to avoid social exchange situations in which we run the risk of getting exploited by others. Several experiments demonstrated that we have better source memory for faces combined with negative rather than positive behavior (Bell & Buchner, Memory & Cognition, 38, 29-41, 2010) or for cheaters and cooperat...

In a series of experiments, Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007) demonstrated that words judged for their relevance to a survival scenario are remembered better than words judged for a scenario not relevant on a survival dimension. They explained this survival-processing effect by arguing that nature "tuned" our memory systems to process and rem...

Nairne and collaborators showed that assessing the relevance of words in the context of an imagined survival scenario boosts memory for these words. Although this survival-processing advantage has attracted a considerable amount of research, little is known about the proximate memory mechanism mediating this effect. Recently, Kroneisen and Erdfelde...

The present study examines memory for social-exchange-relevant information. In Experiment 1 male and female faces were shown together with behaviour descriptions of cheating, altruistic, and neutral behaviour. Previous results have led to the hypothesis that people preferentially remember schema-atypical information. Given the common gender stereot...

A popular hypothesis in evolutionary psychology posits that reciprocal altruism is supported by a cognitive module that helps cooperative individuals to detect and remember cheaters. Consistent with this hypothesis, a source memory advantage for faces of cheaters (better memory for the cheating context in which these faces were encountered) was obs...

Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007) discovered a strong and rather general memory advantage for word material processed in a survival-related context. One possible explanation of this effect conceives survival processing as a special form of encoding: Nature specifically "tuned" our memory systems to process and remember fitness-relevant inform...