Animacy and Memory: A Psychological Perspective on Recall

This essay explores the significant role of animacy in human memory and learning processes. It defines animacy as a complex cognitive function that influences perception, reasoning, and the organization of knowledge, emphasizing its importance in memory and learning, particularly for children. The essay highlights research demonstrating that people recall animate items better than inanimate ones, even in individuals with brain damage. It discusses the impact of item characteristics, such as meaningfulness and emotionality, on memory recall, referencing studies that reanalyzed recall norms and conducted experiments comparing the recall of animate and inanimate objects. The findings consistently indicate an advantage for animate items across various experimental conditions, including encoding tasks and foreign language vocabulary acquisition. The essay concludes by summarizing the evolutionary benefits of animacy and its influence on better recall and memory of objects.

Running head: ANIMACY
ANIMACY
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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This article describes the role of animacy in the comprehension of language. Animacy
has an influence over the basic memory processes too. Recent researches have shown that people
remember animate items better than the inanimate items. Animacy is defined as a complex
cognitive process that affects a person’s learning processes, reasoning, perception and his
organisation of facts and knowledge. Animacy is extremely essential in memory and learning.
For instance, children learn about animate objects in an easier way. Researches have shown that
human newborns are sensitive to basic motion cues that are needed for animacy perception
(Nairne, VanArsdall and Cogdill, 2017). Animacy has been found to affect the brain-damaged
patients too. In a study, it was reported that the patients forgot the ability to remember the names
of the living things however; they remembered the names of the no-living entities.
Item characteristics are extremely important in memory. Episodic memory controls the
item characteristics like meaningfulness and concreteness that are needed for retention of items.
Rubin and Friendly in their investigation of item characteristics used regression techniques in
1986 in norm free call (Nairne, VanArsdall and Cogdill, 2017). They identified three main
components that helped in recalling of the object. These were formation of a visual image,
emotionality associated with the object and availability of the items as a sample of the words.
Other researches have implicated the presence of other variables like the length of the word, age
of acquisition and so on.
Researchers make animacy judgments that tell whether the items represent a living or a
non- living object. It is a difficult job to make comparisons between the animate and inanimate
objects as they differ alongside numerous dimensions (Nairne, VanArsdall and Cogdill, 2017).
Therefore, to get rid of this problem, researches went back to the analysis of recall norms done
by Rubin and Friendly in 1986. As animacy was never contemplated in their study, the

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researchers used words that were coded like living and non-living things. Animacy was added as
a predictor variable and then the data was reanalysed.
The author also conducted experiments to show that animacy is important in retention
and memory. In the experiment, sets of animate as well as inanimate objects were paired along
10 mnemonically dimensions. For example, turtle, an animate object was paired with purse that
is an inanimate object. The chosen dimensions included imagery, familiarity, emotionality and so
on. Then a sample of people were then asked to memorize these words and produce them in a
free-recall experiment. The words were intermingled and then 5 seconds were given to memorize
them. The results indicated that across all trials, the recall of the animate items was better than
the inanimate objects. The production of both categories of the words increased with the number
of trials however, the number of recall of animate items was always better than the inanimate
items (Nairne, VanArsdall and Cogdill, 2017). Similar results have been seen in different
experiments when different word pools were used, for images of different animate objects, on
cued-recall tests and recognition and in between-list designs. Animacy advantages have also
been seen in encoding tasks that needed additional memory load.
A rather uninteresting interpretation of animacy superiority on retention due to category
effect has been ruled out. For example, when the words are categorised in a list, it is easier to
remember them because the candidate can then use the categories as recall cues to produce as
much as possible. People perhaps use the classification of living things to recall the animate
objects (Nairne, VanArsdall and Cogdill, 2017). However, there are no evidences supporting
categorical clustering during recall. People do not tend to remember and recall the animate items
while output and neither recall early. Even if the animate and inanimate objects are matched in a
longer list to mask the advantage of the animacy clustering, then also it is seen that people recall

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the animate objects in higher number than the inanimate objects. The same advantage is seen
even when certain animate words are taken from a limited groups.
The authors also found the effects of animacy processing by conducting an experiment
(Nairne, VanArsdall and Cogdill, 2017). In this experiment, people were asked to memorize non-
words instead of the animate and inanimate objects. The sample was shown pronounceable non-
words along with the characteristics of either living or non-living objects. The task was to assign
the status of living or non-living thing to each non-word and its corresponding property. All the
participants classified each object as a living or non-living object. After this task, a memory task
of non-words were given to be recalled or for recognition. Here too the same animacy advantage
was observed. The objects that were identified as animate were produced during recall more than
those that were identified as inanimate. Thus, by simply identifying the object as animate may
have mnemonic consequences. Therefore, it can be concluded that the human brain is wired to
identify the animate objects more comprehensively.
Animacy based-contagion effect states that the objects which are touched physically by
the animates are recalled more than in the case of inanimate objects (Nairne, VanArsdall and
Cogdill, 2017). The objects that are touched give an understanding of the motivational states of
the agents. The neutral items are not as well remembered as those items that are identified to be
owned by individuals. Objects that have been touched or contacted, transfer their characteristics.
Animacy effect has educational implications as it has been seen that the brain can be
wired to learn different materials and contents. Animacy effects have been seen to facilitate and
acquiring foreign language vocabulary (Nairne, VanArsdall and Cogdill, 2017). Certain Swahili
words with their assigned English translations were given to shown to people. The people had to
produce the proper English translations when the Swahali words were given as cues. However,

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the actual translations of the Swahali words were not given instead such words were chosen that
were animate or inanimate while being matched. People were asked to produce the translations
when given the cue. Animated pairs were recalled more. On replicating the results by another
experiment it was seen that the foreign languages are learned better, when it was associated with
an animated object.
Animacy has evolutionary benefits as animate objects can be seen as predators or food.
The survival of living objects depend on the food chain, mating partners and competing for
resources. All the evidences suggest that animacy is influential in remembering and recalling of
objects in a better way than the inanimate objects.

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References
Nairne, J.S., VanArsdall, J.E. and Cogdill, M., 2017. Remembering the living: Episodic memory
is tuned to animacy. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(1), pp.22-27.