Manipulations of richness of encoding do not modulate the animacy effect on memory.

Abstract

The animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of words denoting animate beings over words denoting inanimate objects. Remembering animate beings may serve important evolutionary functions, but the cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect has remained elusive. According to the richness-of-encoding account, animate words stimulate participants to generate more ideas than inanimate words at encoding. These ideas may later serve as retrieval cues and thus enhance recall. There is as yet only correlational evidence associating rich encoding and the animacy advantage in memory. To experimentally test the assumption that richness of encoding plays a causal role, we examined whether the animacy effect can be modulated by facilitating or suppressing rich encoding. In Experiment 1, richness of encoding was manipulated by requiring participants to write down four ideas or one idea in response to animate and inanimate words. In Experiment 2, the one-idea-generation condition was compared to an unrestricted-idea-generation condition. In Experiment 3, the unrestricted-idea-generation condition was compared to a distractor-task condition in which the idea-generation process was suppressed. In Experiment 4, richness of encoding was manipulated by asking participants to rate the relevance of the words for achieving three survival-related goals or one survival-related goal. Animate words were better remembered than inanimate words. In three of the four experiments, rich encoding led to improved recall. However, none of the manipulations of richness of encoding affected the animacy effect on memory, demonstrating its robustness irrespective of the encoding conditions. These results weaken the richness-of-encoding account of the animacy effect on memory.

The animacy effect on free recall is equally large in mixed and pure word lists or pairs

“…A straightforward implication of this account is that the animacy effect should be larger in mixed lists in which animate words compete with inanimate words for processing resources than in pure lists in which there is no direct competition between animate and inanimate words. Given that almost all previous studies have used mixed lists (e.g., 2 , 5 – 7 , 10 , 12 , 13 ), it was unclear whether the animacy effect would indeed turn out to be smaller in pure lists. The starting point of the present investigation was the observation that in one previous study in which the animacy effect was compared between mixed and pure lists 4 , the results appeared to be ambiguous: At the descriptive level, the animacy effect was about twice as large in the mixed lists compared to the pure lists, but the critical interaction between animacy and list composition was not statistically significant.…”

“…Participants knew that every noun would be presented for 5 s and that it would not be possible to pause or to repeat the presentation. Thus, words were presented one after another as is typical for experiments in which the effect of animacy on free recall is examined (e.g., 2 , 5 – 7 , 12 , 13 , 16 ). Participants were informed that after each list, they would be asked to recall the nouns of that list in any order.…”

“…As yet, progress has mainly been made by ruling out potential cognitive mechanisms. Based on the empirical evidence to date, neither emotional nor mental arousal 12 , 21 , nor perceived threat ( 8 , but see 22 ), nor mental imagery 9 , 23 , nor categorical organization 2 , 7 , 9 , 24 nor richness of encoding ( 13 , but see 15 ) provide satisfactory cognitive accounts of the animacy effect.…”

“…Therefore, experimental manipulations of richness of encoding were necessary to test whether different levels of richness of encoding would affect the animacy effect. The fact that the animacy effect remained unaffected by experimental manipulations of richness of encoding has considerably weakened richness of encoding as the primary cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect 13 . Analogously, the finding that animate words interfere more with color naming than inanimate words in a Stroop-like task 26 is an intriguing phenomenon in itself, but experimental manipulations of attention are necessary to test the causal contribution of attentional prioritization to the animacy effect.…”

“…The animacy effect on free recall is typically examined by asking participants to learn mixed lists of animate and inanimate words (e.g., 2 , 5 – 7 ). Since Nairne et al’s 2 discovery, the animacy effect has been robustly replicated in many languages, including English (e.g., 8 , 9 ), French (e.g., 10 , 11 ), German (e.g., 12 , 13 ), Chinese 14 and Portuguese 5 , using intentional (e.g., 5 , 15 , 16 ) and incidental encoding tasks (e.g., 5 , 6 , 17 ). The animacy effect was discovered as the result of a functional analysis of memory within the adaptive-memory framework (for a review, see 18 ).…”