Department of Psychology, 1 UNF Drive, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL, 32224, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2020 Jul;48(5):788-799. doi: 10.3758/s13421-020-01017-5.
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.
有生命的物品比无生命的物品更容易被记住，这表明人类的记忆已经进化到优先处理与生存相关的信息。生动效应的近似机制尚不清楚，但有一种可能性是，有生命的物品更有可能引起注意，从而导致对这些物品的记忆更好。第一个实验独立地操纵了被试物品的生动性和感知威胁性，发现与无生命的物品相比，有生命的物品的目标识别和错误警报识别都更高，与无威胁的物品相比，有威胁的物品的目标识别和错误警报识别也更高。当计算 d'分数时，这些影响就消除了。第二个实验使用响应信号延迟（RSD）操作，在识别测试中，参与者在短（500 毫秒）或长（2000 毫秒）时间延迟后被迫做出反应。与第一个实验类似，记忆中的生动性和威胁对目标识别和错误警报识别的影响仍然存在，并且与 RSD 操作没有相互作用。综上所述，这些研究结果表明，记忆中的生动性和威胁性效应是稳健的，注意力捕获可能至少部分解释了生动性效应。
