University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL.
Memory. 2022 Nov;30(10):1258-1266. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2022.2102195. Epub 2022 Jul 18.
The animacy effect, the finding that animate items are better remembered than inanimate items, provides evidence that human memory prioritizes information that is related to survival. Various proximate mechanisms for this memory effect have been proposed, including mortality salience, that humans are more likely to remember information related to death, and animate items (e.g., , ) are more likely to elicit thoughts of death than inanimate items (e.g., , ). Mortality salience was manipulated in Experiment 1. Animate items were recalled more than inanimate items and threatening items were recalled more than nonthreatening items, but there was no significant effect of mortality salience. For Experiment 2, norming data were collected rating the word stimuli from the previous experiment on the characteristics of arousal, valence, likelihood to capture attention, and likelihood to elicit thoughts of death. These ratings along with threat ratings and animacy status of the items were included in a regression analysis with the frequency of recall of the items in Experiment 1. In addition to animacy, likelihood to capture attention and likelihood to elicit thoughts of death were significant predictors of recall, suggesting that these characteristics could be at least partly responsible for the animacy effect.
生动性效应，即有生命的物品比无生命的物品更容易被记住，这为人类记忆优先处理与生存相关的信息提供了证据。人们提出了各种这种记忆效应的近似机制，包括死亡凸显，即人类更有可能记住与死亡相关的信息，而有生命的物品（例如，）比无生命的物品（例如，）更有可能引发死亡的想法。在实验 1 中操纵了死亡凸显。有生命的物品比无生命的物品更容易被回忆起来，威胁性物品比非威胁性物品更容易被回忆起来，但死亡凸显没有显著影响。对于实验 2，收集了来自前一个实验的单词刺激的归一化数据，根据唤醒度、效价、吸引注意力的可能性和引发死亡想法的可能性对这些刺激进行了评分。这些评分以及威胁评分和物品的生动性状态被纳入实验 1 中物品回忆频率的回归分析中。除了生动性之外，吸引注意力的可能性和引发死亡想法的可能性也是回忆的重要预测因素，这表明这些特征至少在一定程度上可能是生动性效应的原因。
