Recognition Without Words: Using Taste to Explore Survival Processing

Many educational demonstrations of memory and recall employ word lists and number strings; items that lend themselves to semantic organization and "chunking." By applying taste recall to the adaptive memory paradigm, which evaluates memory from a survival-based evolutionary perspective, we have developed a simple, inexpensive exercise that defies mnemonic strategies. Most adaptive memory studies have evaluated recall of words encountered while imagining survival and non-survival scenarios. Here, we've left the lexical domain and hypothesized that taste memory, as measured by recognition, would be best when acquisition occurs under imagined threat of personal harm, namely poisoning. We tested participants individually while they evaluated eight teas in one of three conditions: in one, they evaluated the toxicity of the tea (survival condition), in a second, they considered the marketability of the tea and, in the third, they evaluated the bitterness of the tea. After a filler task, a surprise recognition task required the participants to taste and identify the eight original teas from a group of 16 that included eight novel teas. The survival condition led to better recognition than the bitterness condition but, surprisingly, it did not yield better recognition than the marketing condition. A second experiment employed a streamlined design more appropriate for classroom settings and failed to support the hypothesis that planning enhanced recognition in survival scenarios. This simple technique has, at least, revealed a robust levels-of-processing effect for taste recognition and invites students to consider the adaptive advantages of all forms of memory.