Is the Survival Processing Advantage a Possible Explanation for Remembering Criminal Events?

Research indicates that enhancing memory retention through the processing of information for its survival relevance is a well-established phenomenon. Two experiments investigated whether contemplating crime-related scenarios could trigger ancestral feelings in participants akin to those in survival situations. In the first experiment, compared with traditional survival-themed scenarios, the crime-related condition failed to significantly improve memory retention. The second experiment examined whether the congruity between stimuli and processing tasks might explain a potential memory advantage for crime-related content. However, we found no evidence supporting congruity’s role in crime contexts. Collectively, our research consistently demonstrated the enhanced memory retention associated with survival processing across both experiments. Yet we did not observe a parallel mnemonic improvement in crime contexts when following the conventional survival processing paradigm (Experiment 1) or manipulating stimuli congruency (Experiment 2). Nevertheless, we encourage future investigations to explore specific crime-related situations (e.g. victimization), which may share certain commonalities with survival processing.