Popp Earl Y, Serra Michael J
a Department of Psychological Sciences , Texas Tech University , Lubbock , TX , USA.
Memory. 2018 Jan;26(1):89-95. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2017.1326507. Epub 2017 May 15.
People often demonstrate better memory for animate concepts (e.g., lion and sailor) than for inanimate concepts (e.g., hammer and mountain). Researchers have attributed this effect to an adaptive memory mechanism that favours information relevant for survival, including information about living things. In the present experiment, we examined the hypothesis that people demonstrate better free-recall performance for animate than inanimate words because animate words tend to be associated with greater mental arousal than inanimate words, a factor that was not controlled for in previous experiments on this topic. To this end, we matched animate and inanimate word lists on mental arousal (and several other factors), and compared participants' free-recall performance for the two word types. We were able to replicate past findings that participants' free-recall of animate words exceeds their free-recall of inanimate words, but we found no support for the possibility that the effect stems from differences in mental arousal between animate and inanimate concepts, as this effect maintained even when the word lists were matched on mental arousal. The present results therefore indicate that mental arousal cannot explain the effects of animacy on free-recall performance.
人们通常对有生命的概念（如狮子和水手）的记忆比对无生命的概念（如锤子和山脉）的记忆更好。研究人员将这种效应归因于一种适应性记忆机制，该机制有利于与生存相关的信息，包括有关生物的信息。在本实验中，我们检验了这样一种假设：人们对有生命的单词比无生命的单词表现出更好的自由回忆表现，因为有生命的单词往往比无生命的单词与更高的心理唤醒相关，而在以往关于该主题的实验中并未控制这一因素。为此，我们在心理唤醒（以及其他几个因素）方面对有生命和无生命的单词列表进行了匹配，并比较了参与者对这两种单词类型的自由回忆表现。我们能够重现过去的研究结果，即参与者对有生命单词的自由回忆超过了他们对无生命单词的自由回忆，但我们没有发现支持这种效应源于有生命和无生命概念之间心理唤醒差异的可能性，因为即使单词列表在心理唤醒方面进行了匹配，这种效应仍然存在。因此，目前的结果表明，心理唤醒不能解释生命性对自由回忆表现的影响。
