Better Free Recall and Worse Cued Recall of Animal Names than Object Names (Poster, Psychonomics 2020)
Abstract
Free recall performance tends to be better for animate stimuli (e.g., animals) than inanimate stimuli (e.g., objects; VanArsdall, Nairne, Pandeirada, & Blunt, 2013). Popp and Serra (2016) replicated this “animacy effect” in free recall of individual words but obtained a “reverse animacy effect” when participants studied animate-animate and inanimate-inanimate words pairs and were tested with cued recall. That is, cued recall was better for inanimate targets than animate targets. Using the Popp and Serra materials, we conducted a preregistered direct replication in a sample of N=101 undergraduate students. Like Popp and Serra, we observed an animacy effect for free recall and a reverse animacy effect for cued recall. Unlike Popp and Serra, we found that controlling for interference effects (i.e., same-category commission errors) rendered the reverse animacy effect non-significant. We take this as evidence that characteristics of the stimulus sets (e.g., category structure, within-category similarity) may play a role in animacy and reverse animacy effects. Participants also answered post-test questions about their experience during the memory tests, with responses indicating partial meta-memorial awareness of animacy effects.
