Testing hypotheses about evolved psychological adaptations is the purview of human evolutionary psychology (HEP). A basic tenet of HEP is that the brain is comprised of specialized modules that evolved in response to selection pressures present in ancestral environments, and these modules support domain specific behavioral and cognitive processes that promoted survival and reproductive fitness during human evolutionary history. One set of cognitive domains involves learning and memory, and HEP has attempted to account for how evolutionary processes have shaped the design features supporting how humans acquire, store and retrieve information.  Similarly, comparative psychology recognizes that cognitive traits of humans and animals are specialized to meet specific environmental challenges. However, these specializations are not regarded as species-specific, but rather reflect either adaptive modifications of general memory processes (e.g., episodic), or are processes that support a specific type of learning (e.g., taste aversions, imprinting, song learning). These alternatives to HEP emphasize the presence of quantitative rather than qualitative differences in learning and memory abilities. The goal of this paper is to examine these contrasting approaches of HEP and comparative psychology, and, using the survival processing effect (Nairne, Thompson, & Pandeirada, 2007, 2008) as an example, evaluate the plausibility of domain-specific adaptive hypotheses of human memory.

The

A general assumption held by evolutionary psychologists is that a reference point for examining the origins and evolution of human psychological adaptations exists within a time range beginning roughly two million years ago. Scenarios for explaining the evolution of human psychological processes often allude to possible election pressures encountered by hominids during this time. unfortunately, comparative psychology and ethology are relatively absent from much current evolutionary psychological thought. Selective pressures that existed during the putative environment of evolutionary adaptedness may have predated the origin of hominids. Based on examples of the evolution of communication, this paper offers another approach to discovering the origins and evolution of psychological traits, with the aim of modifying a potentially misleading assumption of evolutionary psychology.

Abstract

Establishing a place for comparative psychology within the curricula of undergraduate psychology programs in the U.S. can be challenging. Psychology majors typically take a core set of required classes and select the remainder from a menu of options or from purely elective courses offered by faculty that are primarily focused on human behavior. It is within this context that many of us who teach comparative psychology find ourselves competing for space in our undergraduate programs. In this paper I describe a way to make comparative psychology more visible in undergraduate psychology programs. Specifically, I outline a strategy for mapping undergraduate courses in comparative psychology onto the American Psychological Association’s (2013) guidelines for the undergraduate major. The aim is to bring our unique  contributions into focus, offer clarity on common course objectives, and hopefully offer something useful for assessing undergraduate student learning.