Are animacy effects in episodic memory independent of encoding instructions?

Abstract

The adaptive view of human memory [Nairne, J. S. 2010. Adaptive memory: Evolutionary constraints on remembering. In B. H. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 53 pp. 1-32). Burlington: Academic Press; Nairne, J. S., & Pandeirada, J. N. S. 2010a. Adaptive memory: Ancestral priorities and the mnemonic value of survival processing. Cognitive Psychology, 61, 1-22, 2010b; Memory functions. In The Corsini encyclopedia of psychology and behavioral science, (Vol 3, 4th ed. pp. 977-979). Hokoben, NJ: John Wiley & Sons] assumes that animates (e.g., baby, rabbit presented as words or pictures) are better remembered than inanimates (e.g., bottle, mountain) because animates are more important for fitness than inanimates. In four studies, we investigated whether the animacy effect in episodic memory (i.e., the better remembering of animates over inanimates) is independent of encoding instructions. Using both a factorial (Studies 1 and 3) and a multiple regression approach (Study 2), three studies tested whether certain contexts drive people to attend to inanimate more than to animate things (or the reverse), and therefore lead to differential animacy effects. The findings showed that animacy effects on recall performance were observed in the grassland-survival scenario used by Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007. Adaptive memory: Survival processing enhances retention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 33, 263-273) (Studies 1-3), when words were rated for their pleasantness (Study 2), and in explicit learning (Study 3). In the non-survival scenario of moving to a foreign land (Studies 1-2), animacy effects on recall rates were not reliable in Study 1, but were significant in Study 2, whereas these effects were reliable in the non-survival scenario of planning a trip as a tour guide (Study 3). A final (control) study (Study 4) was conducted to test specifically whether animacy effects are related to the more organised nature of animates than inanimates. Overall, the findings suggest that animacy effects are robust since they do not vary across different sets of encoding instructions (e.g., encoding for survival, preparing a trip and pleasantness).

Exploring word memorability: How well do different word properties explain item free-recall probability?

“…Several of the function-related properties from Heard et al (2015) also performed quite well (which also included size and animacy). The magnitude of the correlations with danger and usefulness are particularly interesting, as one of possible explanation for the previous results with animacy and its robust effects across experimental designs (e.g., Nairne et al, 2013;Bonin et al, 2015;Gelin et al, 2017), namely that animacy is related to survival relevance and demonstrates the adaptive nature of memory. Considering that correlations of r >.20 have been shown to stabilise around df=250 in mathematical simulations (Schönbrodt & Perugini, 2013), it would be ideal for future databases to prioritise expanding these ratings to a more extensive sample of words.…”

“…recognition, words vs. pictures, different encoding instructions) (Bonin et al, 2014(Bonin et al, , 2015Gelin et al, 2017). Later work has further built on this foundation to first suggest potential mechanisms (e.g., Bonin et al, 2015;Popp & Serra, 2016), though many of these have since been ruled out, such as being mediated by imagery (Gelin et al, 2019), emotional arousal (Popp & Serra, 2018;Meinhardt et al, 2018), or threat (Leding, 2019).…”

“…Some properties are related to their lexical features, such as the number of letters (better recall for short words; e.g., Frincke, 1968;Baddeley et al, 1975;Hulme et al, 2004;Tehan & Tolan, 2007), number of syllables (better recall for fewer syllables; e.g., Watkins, 1972;Baddeley et al, 1975;Hulme et al, 2004), word frequency (better recall for high frequency; e.g., Hall, 1954;Sumby, 1963;Gregg, 1976;Madan et al, 2010;Popov & Reder, 2019), and orthographic neighbourhood size (better recall for more neighbours; e.g., Jalbert et al, 2011aJalbert et al, , 2011bGlanc & Greene, 2012). Other properties are related to their semantic features, such as age of acquisition (better recall for late acquired; e.g., Morris, 1981;Dewhurst et al, 1998), concreteness (better recall for high concreteness; e.g., Stoke, 1929;Paivio et al, 1968;Frincke, 1968;Madan et al, 2010), animacy (better recall for living things [discussed in more detail in the Methods section]; e.g., Nairne et al, 2013;Bonin et al, 2014Bonin et al, , 2015Popp & Serra, 2016;Gelin et al, 2017;Leding, 2019), number of features/semantic richness (better recall for higher number of features; e.g., Hargreaves et al, 2012), and motoric properties (better recall for words referring to functional objects; Madan & Singhal, 2012;Montefinese et al, 2013;Madan, 2014). Additionally, affective properties such as arousal and valence are also related to recall (better recall for high arousal and more extreme valence; e.g., Kensinger & Corkin, 2003;Buch...…”

Adaptive memory: Animacy, threat, and attention in free recall

“…The animacy advantage was replicated using pronounceable nonwords that were paired with properties of animate or inanimate objects (VanArsdall, Nairne, Pandeirada, & Blunt, 2013). The animacy effect has been replicated across a variety of experiments, including with recognition memory (Bonin, Gelin, & Bugaiska, 2014), independent of encoding instructions (Gelin, Bugaiska, Méot, & Bonin, 2017;Leding, 2018), for picture stimuli (Bonin et al, 2014), and with children participants (Aslan & John, 2016; see Nairne, VanArsdall, & Cogdill, 2017 for a review). Popp and Serra (2016) further explored the effect of animacy and created a normed list of animate and inanimate items where the two lists were equated on the characteristics of length, frequency, mental imagery, and concreteness.…”

“…The animacy effect for memory has been well established (e.g., Nairne et al, 2013;Gelin et al, 2017;Popp & Serra 2016, 2018; animate items are better remembered than inanimate items across a variety of experimental manipulations and materials (see Nairne et al, 2017 for a review). As suggested by several researchers, including Bonin et al (2014), Gelin et al (in press), Serra (2016), andVanArsdall et al (2013), it is likely that animacy is not directly exerting an effect on memory, but that there are proximate mechanisms responsible for the animacy effect.…”