Evolutionary cognitive psychology

Stephanie A. Kazanas

Chapter 5 in Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, 2026, pp 82-96 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter describes the prioritization of cognitive processes for fitness-relevant information. Findings from recall and recognition tasks using words, images, and faces indicate attention and memory are directed toward domains including survival-relevance, animacy, contamination, mortality, cheating, and mating. Examples include memory advantages for words following survival processing, objects appearing with infectious individuals, and attractive faces perceived as mating rivals. These findings largely support an ultimate, fitness-relevance mechanism underlying cognition, though studies show cognitive performance also benefits from additional, proximate mechanisms (e.g., richness of encoding, arousal, mental imagery). These fitness-relevant domains are explored, with a particular focus on how scenarios are presented to participants, what researchers measure, and how these scenarios fare against various control scenarios. Aims for future research are presented for each domain to encourage researchers to explore their proximate mechanisms, generalizability, and real-world relevance.

Keywords: Survival Processing; Animacy; Contamination; Mortality Salience; Memory For Cheaters; Mate-selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035332496
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