Adaptive Memory: Perspectives, Conclusions, and Future Directions

This chapter provides an overview of the current volume, Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Advances in Understanding Adaptive Memory, and summarizes the main findings within each of its four sections. Those sections focus on the following: survival scenarios and memory; anthropological and comparative perspectives; age-related perspectives; and cognitive neuroscience and forensic approaches. Within each section, main findings or observations are summarized and discussed with an eye towards the integration of information across chapters and sections, as well as future directions for research and the development of theory in the field of adaptive or survival memory. Concluding remarks point to the following notions: (1) collecting data that uses a ‘cross task’ or triangulation approach can yield richer data and findings in this area of work; (2) fundamental to many of the effects reported herein is a ‘richness-of-encoding’ feature that appears to accompany memory advantages within the survival paradigm; (3) neuroscientific and other technological approaches and advances can yield even more knowledge related to these effects; and (4) emotion and the study of emotional influences on adaptive memory processing is an as yet untapped but potentially rich source of knowledge in terms of the proximal mechanisms that guide these effects. This chapter serves as the final, culminating work that summarizes the overall reported data and observations that are richly detailed within the volume, on the whole.