AHS19

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.