Animacy effects in episodic memory: do imagery processes really play a role?

ABSTRACT

Animates are remembered better than inanimates because the former are ultimately more important for fitness than the latter. What, however, are the proximate mechanisms underpinning this effect? We focused on imagery processes as one proximate explanation. We tested whether animacy effects are related to the vividness of mental images (Study 1), or to the dynamic/motoric nature of mental images corresponding to animate words (Study 2). The findings showed that: (1) Animates are not estimated to be more vivid than inanimates; (2) The potentially more dynamic nature of the representations of animates does not seem to be a factor making animates more memorable than inanimates. We compared (Study 3) a condition in which participants had to categorise animate and inanimate words with a condition in which they had to form mental images from them. The animacy effect was significant after categorising but not after forming mental imagery. In Study 4, we compared the recall rates of animates and inanimates after these words had been encoded with or without a concurrent visual-spatial memory load. Again, animates were better remembered than inanimates. Taken overall, the findings do not fit well with the hypothesis that imagery processes support animacy effects in memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Episodic memory
• animacy
• mental imagery
• evolutionary psychology

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Arnaud D’Argembeau and two anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments on previous versions of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We are aware of the fact that plants are also living things that barely move, and might therefore be included in the category of animates. However, in our studies, we considered only animals and humans as animates, setting aside the issue of the status of plants in episodic memory. We acknowledge that plants should be the focus of future studies on animacy effects in memory. Also, the definition of animacy used here (and which is the standard definition used in the literature on animacy effects in memory) excludes from the category of animates many things (e.g., robots, vehicles, weather phenomena, and bodies of water) that can move but are not living things.

2. However, it has to be acknowledged that it is also possible to find a number of inanimates that elicit high levels of motoric experience (e.g., forks, screwdrivers), because they were designed for motoric interaction with the human body, and it is also true that there are many cases of animates for which motoric interaction with a human body seems difficult if not impossible (e.g., interacting with a shark), or highly constrained (e.g., playing with a tiger is possible but only in specific circumstances such as with a tamer).

3. In effect, Gelin et al. (2017) found animacy effects not only when participants were instructed to encode words for their survival value but also when they encoded words in non-survival scenarios, such as planning a trip as a tour guide, or moving to a new house. Animates are also remembered better when words are rated for their pleasantness (Gelin et al., 2017) or even when they have to be explicitly learned (Bonin et al., 2015).

4. The difference was also significant (p < .05) when the imagery study from the current Study 2, for which the observed animacy effect was negative, was excluded, t(122.1) = 2.39.