Commentary: Shaping men's memory: the effects of a female's waist-to-hip ratio on men's memory for her appearance and biographical information

摘要

“But what the hell is it for?” asked Alan Baddeley (1988) about human memory. From an adaptive perspective, our mnemonic systems ought to be calibrated to retain information of high adaptive value i.e., that which promotes individual survival and reproduction (Tooby and Cosmides, 1989; Klein et al., 2002). To address the former, the last decade has seen the emergence of an extensive functionalist literature providing evidence of a survival mode in episodic memory (for a review, see Nairne and Pandeirada, 2016). These experiments characterize memory as the process of a general survival optimization system, attuned toward relevant stimulus.