The Animate and The Inanimate

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According to Nairne ( in press), the criticisms raised against the evolutionary account of the survival memory advantage have come from a misunderstanding between ultimate and proximate explanations. Without going into the details of the line of argument, he defines ultimate explanations as “statements about the function of a trait and ‘why’ it would have been selected by nature during an evolutionary process,” whereas proximate explanations “focus on the mechanisms that produced the trait—that is, they are statements about ‘how’ the trait works and the condition under which the trait is likely to be expressed” (p. 309). Following this distinction, memory evolved because it solved specific problems related to fitness (e.g., remembering information processed for its survival value as indexed by the survival memory paradigm). One consequence of memory system evolution is that information relevant to survival would be afforded special status. However, the proximate mechanisms underpinning the retention advantages may well be elaborative, distinctive or self-related encoding. The location of the split (the line which divides the inherently agentive participants from the inherently patientive participants) varies from language to language, and, in many cases, the two classes overlap, with a class of nouns near the middle of the hierarchy being marked for both the agent and patient roles. a b c d e f g Klenin, Emily (1983). Animacy in Russian: a new interpretation. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers. Elsewhere, animacy is displayed syntactically, such as in endings of modifiers for masc nouns of the second declension. [4] Animacy as a "subgender" [ edit ] Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around the globe and is a distinction acquired as early as six months of age. [1]

In our study, animate words were given SER ( M = 3.00, SD = 0.81) that did not differ reliably from inanimate words ( M = 3.08, SD = 0.67), t< 1. It was also the case in the Nairne et al. ( in press) study ( M = 3.04, SD = 0.82, vs. M = 3.38, SD = 0.46), t< 1. Wiggett, A., Pritchard, I. C., & Downing, P. E. (2009). Animate and inanimate objects in human visual cortex: Evidence for task-independent category effects. Neuropsychologia, 47, 3111–3117. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.07.008Burns, D. J., Burns, S. A., & Hwang, A. J. (2011). Adaptive memory: Determining the proximate mechanisms responsible for the memorial advantages of survival processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37, 206–218. doi: 10.1037/a0021325 The difficulties Sidis encountered in dealing with the social structure of a collegiate setting may have shaped opinion against allowing such children to rapidly advance through higher education in his day. Research indicates that a challenging curriculum can relieve social and emotional difficulties gifted children commonly experience. [48] Bibliography [ edit ] Klein, S. T. (2013). Does optimal recall performance in the adaptive memory paradigm require the encoding context to encourage thoughts about the environment of evolutionary adaptation? Memory & Cognition, 41, 49–59. doi: 10.3758/s13421-012-0239-8 A contrasting hypothesis with respect to the effects of divided attention during encoding is that the memory benefit for animate relative to inanimate items occurs because of attention-demanding controlled processes, such as greater elaboration of animate than inanimate items. The controlled processing hypothesis is supported by Meinhardt et al. ( 2020), who found that animate words elicit more thoughts than inanimate words. They presented participants with a list of animate and inanimate words and, for each word, asked participants to write down whatever thoughts came to mind, with no time limit. Participants in both studies provided more thoughts when presented with animate words as compared to inanimate words. Further, the number of thoughts generated partially mediated the animacy effect in recall. Though correlational, these results suggest that animate items can elicit more elaborative thoughts, and that the additional elaboration could partially account for the recall advantage. Second, and more generally, an important and recurring issue in experimental psychology is to ensure that an effect on a behavioral outcome is genuinely attributable to the manipulation carried out and not to another potential (but uncontrolled) variable. This concern applies here as one cannot definitively ascertain that the animacy effect in memory is not attributable to another influential variable. In other words, the animacy effect could be due to (an)other characteristic(s) of the words that is (are) correlated with the animate–inanimate distinction. This concern is particularly relevant in psycholinguistic studies in which researchers aim to establish which specific characteristics of the words play a role in lexical processing. Controlling for stimuli in psycholinguistic experiments has been said to be a difficult challenge (Cutler, 1981). To give an example, a lively debate in the literature on object and word naming has concerned whether the effect of the frequency of encountering words is actually a genuine effect of word frequency or is due to another factor such as age of acquisition (AoA). Some researchers have claimed that word frequency effects in object naming are in fact AoA effects (Bonin, Fayol, & Chalard, 2001), but subsequent studies using better word frequency measures have found effects of both variables (e.g., Bonin et al., 2003b).

A group of 30 adults (mean age 23.63 years) taken from the same pool as in Experiment 1 and having the same characteristics took part in the experiment. Stimuli

Tulving, E. (1985). Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychologist, 26, 1–12. doi: 10.1037/h0080017 Masc nouns that show acc-gen (sg & plural) syncretism: муж [muʂ] husband, сын [sɨn] son, лев [lʲef] lion, конь [konʲ] horse. [4] Although Experiment 1 of VanArsdall et al.’s ( 2013) study used recognition memory for nonwords, the animacy effect has previously only been reported with words in free-recall tasks (Nairne et al., in press). The aim of Experiment 3 was therefore to assess whether it would also appear in a recognition task. More importantly, we collected “remember” and “know” responses for each item judged as “recognized” since such responses are thought to reflect the kind of memory trace formed during encoding. Two important findings emerged from the analyses. First of all, the animacy property enhanced the quantity of recognized words, as more animate than inanimate words were recognized. Secondly, animate words yielded higher R-responses than inanimate words, indicating greater conscious awareness of encoding these stimuli, suggesting that animacy enhances the quality of memory traces leading to greater episodic retrieval. This finding suggests that the participants were spontaneously engaged in elaborative encoding for animate words. These findings also support the idea that the mnemonic advantage of animate words is provided by the recollection component. From an evolutionary perspective, the key uses of episodic memory are to maintain a sense of self-continuity, to ensure successful social interaction, and to direct future behavior on the basis of information about past events (Raby & Clayton, 2012). Given the functions of episodic memory and the properties of animate objects (e.g., animates can act whereas inanimates move only when something/someone acts on them; animates can know, perceive, emote, learn and think; Gelman & Spelke, 1981), it is likely that animate objects will be recollected with more episodic details than inanimate objects.