Is a (Threatening) Picture (of an Animate Stimulus) Worth a Thousand Words? The Animacy Effect Using Eyetracking and Photographic Stimuli.

The mnemonic effects of animacy and threat were explored with photographic stimuli. After studying labeled photographs of animate and inanimate items that were either threatening or nonthreatening, participants recalled significantly more animate items than inanimate items and more threatening items than nonthreatening items. However, a recognition test of the photographs showed higher accuracy for inanimate photographs. Eyetracking technology was utilized in the second experiment to determine if participants' eye movements are affected by the animacy or threat status of stimuli and whether the pattern of eye movements were similar to the pattern of memory results. The free recall patterns followed the typical effects of animacy and threat, but a reverse animacy effect was again found in photograph recognition. Further, eyetracking measures revealed patterns similar to those of the free recall data, with more fixations and more time spent viewing animate items and threatening items. The data present a dichotomy between memory for the specific details of the studied stimuli (i.e., the details of the studied photographs) and memory for the more general semantic information of the studied stimuli (i.e., the ability to recall more animate items than inanimate items). The results of the eyetracking show that animate items and threatening items are more likely to capture visual attention of participants when compared to inanimate items and nonthreatening items, which could be at least partly responsible for the increased memory for these item types in recall memory, but not necessarily recognition memory.