Abstract: It is well known that memory system evolved. Survival pressures, a primary adaptive problem the human has been facing, had shaped some characters of memory system. Recent researches found memory performance is better in survival processing procedure than in other processing procedures, which is named as survival advantage of memory. A lot of experiments indicated survival processing may be a special and powerful memory encoding procedure, which is different from many memory encoding procedures, such as schematic processing, relational processing, congruity effect, elaboration, effortful processing, emotional arousal, familiarity, novelty, and self-reference, and so on. At last the authors suggested that in future researches we should focus on: 1) neural mechanisms of survival processing; 2) children as subjects; 3) effect of different areas and cultures; 4) false memory of survival processing.

Key words: adaptive memory, survival processing, survival advantage, domain-specific