B. Seitz - Exploring Biological Significance in Human Memory and a Bias Towards Remembering [...]
Channel: AncestryFoundation
Date: 2019-10-12

The human memory system is the product of millions of years of selective pressures and such pressures can be revealed in the form of memory biases towards fitness relevant information. Even neutral information, when processed in a manner that makes it fitness relevant, is better recalled than that same information processed in a non-fitness relevant way. Empirical demonstrations of these imagined processing scenarios that enhance memory due to their fitness relevant nature are discussed as are their theoretical relevance to a larger adaptive memory framework. This framework informs a number of studies we have conducted that explore the accuracy of how eating events are remembered. Overall, we observe a bias towards better remembering a number of aspects of eating events compared to similar procedural tasks. Proximate and ultimate explanations of this phenomena are considered as well as the practical health implications of these findings.
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Benjamin Seitz, M.A.
Ben is a 2nd year PhD student at UCLA where he works under the supervision of Dr. Aaron Blaisdell and Dr. Janet Tomiyama. His research is primarily concerned with understanding how learning and memory processes affect eating behaviors and, conversely, how eating events are learned about and remembered. As an undergraduate, he was advised by Ralph Miller and David Sloan Wilson which accounts for his background in associative learning and evolutionary theory. You can find out more about him and his research here http://benjaminseitz.wixsite.com/mysite.