MEMORY FOR ORIENTATION IN THE NATURAL-ENVIRONMENT

Previous work has demonstrated that memory for information to which pe ople have been exposed for a prolonged period in everyday life may be very poor. One interpretation of such findings is that we tend to reme mber only information that is likely to be of future functional releva nce. However, it is also noticeable that previous investigations have in general studied memory concerning artefacts of arbitrary design rat her than the natural environment. As the product of an evolutionary pr ocess, it is possible that memory is in general adapted towards dealin g with the natural rather than the artificial. For example, in the cas e of one frequently encountered artefact it has been shown that people retain little information as to whether the head on a coin faces to l eft or right. The present study probed a naturally occurring counterpa rt to this, by examining recall of the orientation of the crescent moo n. For a new moon it is the right-hand side of the moon that is illumi nated whereas for an old moon it is the left-hand side, in the norther n hemisphere. The results of Experiment 1 indicated no retention of th is information by participants (though, as the results of Experiment 4 confirmed, participants did remember that the new and old moons have opposite orientations). The results of Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed t he absence of retention when recall was cued by reference to the solar cycle rather than the lunar cycle, either singly or in combination. I t is concluded that, contrary to expectation, memory for the natural e nvironment is in this case no better than memory for the artificial en vironment, consistent with the primary role in determining the content of everyday memory being taken by functional relevance. (C) 1997 by J ohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd.