ArticleMemory & cognition2020
Animacy and threat in recognition memory.
Article in Memory & cognition, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Encoding Effort Eliminates the Animacy Advantage in Memory When Manipulated with Value-Directed Remembering.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- An exploration of the influence of animal and object categories on recall of item location following an incidental learning task.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2025Article
- Agency effects on the binding of event elements in episodic memory.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2024Article
- The breadth of animacy in memory: New evidence from prospective memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- The animacy advantage in memory occurs under self-paced study conditions, but participants' metacognitive beliefs can deter it.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Analyzing the structure of animacy: Exploring relationships among six new animacy and 15 existing normative dimensions for 1,200 concrete nouns.Memory & cognition · 2022Article
- Animate and Inanimate Words Demonstrate Equivalent Retrieval Dynamics Despite the Occurrence of the Animacy Advantage.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Is a (Threatening) Picture (of an Animate Stimulus) Worth a Thousand Words? The Animacy Effect Using Eyetracking and Photographic Stimuli.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Animate items are better remembered than inanimate items, suggesting that human memory has evolved to prioritize information related to survival. The proximate mechanisms for the animacy effect are not yet known, but one possibility is that animate items are more likely to capture attention, which then leads to better memory for those items. The first experiment independently manipulated the animacy and perceived threat of studied items and found that both target recognition and false-alarm recognition were higher for animate items compared to inanimate items and for threatening items compared to non-threatening items. The effects were eliminated when d' scores were calculated. The second experiment used a response signal delay (RSD) manipulation where participants were forced to respond after a short (500 ms) or long (2,000 ms) time delay during the recognition test. Similar to the first experiment, the effects of animacy and threat for target recognition and false-alarm recognition persisted and did not interact with the RSD manipulation. Taken together, the results of the studies suggest that the animacy and threat effects in memory are robust and that attention capture might be at least partly responsible for the animacy effect.
Indexed as
Identifiers
31997151What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.