International Journal of Comparative Psychology

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.