Jim Nairne was recently awarded $392,283.00 from the National Science Foundation.

Our capacity to remember is certainly the product of an extended period of evolution. Yet if human memory evolved, sculpted by the processes of natural selection, then its processes likely bear the “footprints” of ancestral selection pressures. In particular, our memory systems should be “tuned” to retain information that is fitness-relevant, pertaining to survival and reproduction. Our research explores this by comparing and contrasting how memory operates in fitness-relevant and fitness-irrelevant situations.