A cautionary note on the studies using the picture-word interference paradigm: the unwelcome consequences of the random use of “in/animates”

Abstract

The picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm allows us to delve into the process of lexical access in language production with great precision. It creates situations of interference between target pictures and superimposed distractor words that participants must consciously ignore to name the pictures. Yet, although the PWI paradigm has offered numerous insights at all levels of lexical representation, in this work we expose an extended lack of control regarding the variable animacy. Animacy has been shown to have a great impact on cognition, especially when it comes to the mechanisms of attention, which are highly biased toward animate entities to the detriment of inanimate objects. Furthermore, animate nouns have been shown to be semantically richer and prioritized during lexical access, with effects observable in multiple psycholinguistic tasks. Indeed, not only does the performance on a PWI task directly depend on the different stages of lexical access to nouns, but also attention has a fundamental role in it, as participants must focus on targets and ignore interfering distractors. We conducted a systematic review with the terms “picture-word interference paradigm” and “animacy” in the databases PsycInfo and Psychology Database. The search revealed that only 12 from a total of 193 PWI studies controlled for animacy, and only one considered it as a factor in the design. The remaining studies included animate and inanimate stimuli in their materials randomly, sometimes in a very disproportionate amount across conditions. We speculate about the possible impact of this uncontrolled variable mixing on many types of effects within the framework of multiple theories, namely the Animate Monitoring Hypothesis, the WEAVER++ model, and the Independent Network Model in an attempt to fuel the theoretical debate on this issue as well as the empirical research to turn speculations into knowledge.

Plantness, Animalness, and Humanness: plant placement within animacy and adjacent scales

“…Plants formed a clear cluster adjacent to natural inanimate elements, with robots also in an adjacent cluster. In both human responses and computer modeling, plants were difficult to classify, and have been recognized as weakly animate (Sá-Leite et al, 2023). An interesting note: the model had more difficulty with plants than any other object category and ranked the animacy of plants slightly higher than human subjects had.…”

“…Within the brain, animacy is a recognizable gradient present in visual processing and recognition by the occipitotemporal cortex (Ritchie et al, 2021), and within the human ventral vision pathway it also forms a continuum not linked to any single attribute (i.e., colour, texture, movement;Sha et al, 2015). The 'animacy effect' recognizes a possible processing advantage of animate over inanimate objects in which greater interest and memory retention is given to animate objects (Félix, Pandeirada, & Nairne, 2019;Gelin et al, 2017;Mieth et al, 2019;Sá-Leite et al, 2023;VanArsdall et al, 2015). This has been identified from parts and pathways in the brain that specifically play a role in memory and animacy (Henderson et al, 2021;Jozwik, Najarro, & Cichy, 2022).…”