Mixed evidence for a richness-of-encoding account of animacy effects in memory from the generation-of-ideas paradigm

Catégorie

Journal Article

Auteurs

Patrick Bonin, Gaëtan Thiebaut, Aurélia Bugaiska, Alain Méot

Année

2022

Titre

Mixed evidence for a richness-of-encoding account of animacy effects in memory from the generation-of-ideas paradigm

Journal / Livre / Conférence

Current Psychology

Résumé

Animacy effects in memory correspond to the observation that animates (e.g., cow) are remembered better than inanimates
(e.g., pencil). Although the ultimate explanation of these effects seems to be well-documented, clear evidence that would
support one or other of the proximate explanations of animacy effects has proven difficult to obtain. Here, we focused on the
richness-of-encoding account of animacy effects in memory, which assumes that animates are recalled better than inanimates
because the former are encoded with many more distinct associations with other items (i.e., richer memory traces) than the
latter. Our goal was to provide further evidence for this account by replicating and extending the analyses of Meinhardt,
Bell, Buchner, and Röer (2020) showing that more ideas are generated in response to animate than inanimate words and,
importantly, that this generation process mediates the better recall of animates over inanimates. In line with the richnessof-
encoding account, we successfully replicated the finding that more ideas were produced in response to animates than
inanimates. Even though there is some evidence that the generation of ideas mediates animacy effects in memory, we also
report findings from reanalyses of previous studies (Bonin et al., Experimental Psychology, 62, 371–384, Bonin et al., 2015;
Gelin et al., Memory, 25, 2–18, Gelin et al., 2017; Gelin et al., Memory, 27, 209–223, Gelin et al., 2019) which—although
supporting mediation—show that the number of ideas generated in response to animate and inanimate words cannot reliably
predict memory of these words when they are learned in different encoding contexts.

Issue

41

Pages

1653–1662

Mots-clés

animacy · richness-of-encoding · adaptive memory · episodic memory

Liens relatifs

  • https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02666-8

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