A direct replication and extension of Popp and Serra (2016, experiment 1): better free recall and worse cued recall of animal names than object names, accounting for semantic similarity

Frontiers in Psychology

Psychology

Randall K. Jamieson¹  D. Stephen Lindsay²  Kelly E. L. Grannon²  Alison Campbell²  Nicholas Tamburri²  Eric Y. Mah² 

[1] Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada;Department of Psychology, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada;

关键词: adaptive memory;    animacy;    cued recall;    free recall;    direct replication;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1146200

 received in 2023-01-17, accepted in 2023-04-13,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

IntroductionFree recall tends to be better for names of animate concepts such as animals than for names of inanimate objects. In Popp and Serra’s 2016 article, the authors replicated this “animacy effect” in free recall but when participants studied words in pairs (animate-animate pairs intermixed with inanimate-inanimate pairs) and were tested with cued recall, performance was better for inanimate-inanimate pairs than for animate-animate pairs (“reverse animacy”). We tested the replicability of this surprising effect and one possible explanation for the effect (semantic similarity).MethodsOur Experiment 1 was a preregistered direct replication (N = 101) of Popp and Serra’s Experiment 1 (mixed-lists condition). In a second preregistered experiment conducted in four different samples (undergraduate N = 153, undergraduate N = 143, online Prolific N = 101, online Prolific/English-as-a-first-language N = 150), we manipulated the within-category semantic similarity of animal and object wordlists.ResultsAIn Experiment 1, just as in Popp and Serra, we observed an animacy effect for free recall and a reverse animacy effect for cued recall. Unlike Popp and Serra, we found that controlling for interference effects rendered the reverse animacy effect non-significant. We took this as evidence that characteristics of the stimulus sets (e.g., category structure, within-category similarity) may play a role in animacy and reverse animacy effects. In Experiment 2, in three out of our four samples, we observed reverse animacy effects when within-category similarity was higher for animals and when within-category similarity was equated for animals and objects.DiscussionOur results suggest that the reverse animacy effect observed in Popp and Serra’s 2016 article is a robust and replicable effect, but that semantic similarity alone cannot explain the effect.

【 授权许可】

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Copyright © 2023 Mah, Grannon, Campbell, Tamburri, Jamieson and Lindsay.