Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2026 (ESCI, Scopus)
Human memory appears to be tuned to prioritize information relevant to survival, a phenomenon known as the Survival Processing Effect (SPE). This effect has been widely replicated when individuals process information while imagining themselves in life-threatening survival situations. However, it remains unclear whether such mnemonic advantages extend to imagining others, particularly close genetic relatives such as biological siblings. According to inclusive fitness theory, which posits that organisms are evolutionarily motivated to enhance the survival and reproductive success of their kin to promote the transmission of shared genetic material, one might expect survival-related memory benefits to generalize to close relatives. Drawing on this theoretical framework, the present study investigated whether the SPE occurs not only when imagining oneself but also when imagining a sibling or a stranger facing survival challenges. Participants rated the relevance of words in four encoding conditions asking them to imagine survival scenarios involving themselves, a sibling, or a stranger, with a pleasantness rating condition serving as a non-survival control. Contrary to predictions derived from inclusive fitness theory, no mnemonic advantage was observed for sibling condition relative to self or stranger ones. Both traditional ANOVA and generalized linear mixed model analyses confirmed that while all survival-related encoding conditions enhanced memory compared to the pleasantness control, they did not significantly differ from each other. These findings suggest that survival-based memory enhancements may be driven primarily by general adaptive mechanisms, rather than genetic relatedness. Overall, the results highlight the broad sensitivity of human memory to survival contexts regardless of who is imagined to be at risk.