Memory - Nature's Criterion:

James S. Nairne:

"Imagine you were given the task of designing a human memory system from scratch. What features would you include and why? As memory’s architect, you would need a criterion, a metric against which you could judge the acceptability of design features. Modern memory theorists use a task-based criterion: People are asked to remember information for a test, such as recall or recognition, and proffered features must help predict or explain performance on the test. Although rarely justified, the choice of criterial task is obviously important. It constrains theory development and colors the theory’s final form. For example, theories of free recall lean heavily on a construct called ‘‘temporal context’’ because free recall requires people to remember information in the absence of explicit cues (e.g., Howard & Kahana, 2002; Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1981). Yet, the capacity to remember and forget did not emerge from the mind of a memory theorist—it evolved through a tinkering process called natural selection (Darwin, 1859; Jacob, 1977). Design through natural selection has its own stringent criterion: Structural features, once they arise, are maintained if they enhance fitness—that is, survival en route to differential reproduction. If the capacity to remember failed to confer a fitness advantage, modern brains would likely lack a tendency to reference the past. Memory systems need to be adaptive or, at least, they needed to have been adaptive at some point in our evolutionary past (e.g., Symons, 1992). In building a memory system from scratch, then, the lesson of evolutionary biology is clear—pay heed to nature’s criterion."

Source:
https://scispace.com/pdf/adaptive-memory-evolutionary-constraints-on-remembering-4rvu0x2thr.pdf

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"we have long known that fitness-relevant events can produce salient long-term retention."