Memory mirrors the statistics of the world it must serve

Correct: B — Information needs in the natural environment, where recently or repeatedly encountered items are more likely to recur

Anderson & Schooler (1991) extracted reoccurrence statistics from real-world information environments — words in newspaper headlines, names in email, parental child-directed speech — and showed that the probability an item will be needed again decays as a power function of recency and increases with frequency, in the same form as classical forgetting curves and access-latency curves. They concluded that human memory is a 'rational' adaptation to environmental statistics: the system is tuned to make available exactly those items most likely to be needed. The framework grounds adaptive-control models like ACT-R and reframes memory limits as ecological optimization, not flaws.