Contamination Is “Good” for Your Memory! Further Evidence for the Adaptive View of Memory

Five studies were designed to provide further evidence of contamination effects in memory. In study 1, participants were told to imagine that either (1) they had been infected in the grasslands of a foreign land (ancestral contamination); (2) they had been infected during a trip in a foreign country (modern contamination); or (3) as tour guide, they had to organize a trip (control condition). Words processed within a contamination scenario...