Adaptive Memory

Nairne, James S.; VanArsdall, Joshua E.; Pandeirada, Josefa N. S.; Cogdill, Mindi; LeBreton, James M.

doi:10.1177/0956797613480803

Cited by 139 publications

(139 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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127

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“…Although a great deal of research has been presented as showing a processing advantage in attention, memory, and other cognitive domains for animate compared to inanimate entities (e.g., Abrams & Christ, 2003; Bonin et al, 2013; Capitani et al, 2003; Caramazza & Mahon, 2003; Caramazza & Shelton, 1998; Gobbini et al, 2011; Johansson, 1973; Nairne et al, 2013; New et al, 2007; Pratt et al, 2010; VanArsdall et al, 2014), the current results suggest that these effects may instead be due to the ease with which an entity is perceived as an agent. Demonstrations of an advantage for processing animate versus inanimate entities have been cited as evidence for the evolutionary pruning of the human mind to adapt to the primeval challenges of survival (Nairne et al, 2013; New et al, 2007).…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 70%

“…The distinction between animate and inanimate is a critical component of semantic knowledge (Caramazza & Mahon, 2003), emerges early in development (Opfer & Gelman, 2011), and is associated with distinct patterns of brain activation (Caramazza & Shelton, 1998; Gobbini et al, 2011). Finally, words or pictures representing animate entities are better remembered than those representing inanimate entities (Bonin, Gelin, & Bugaiska, 2013; Nairne, VanArsdall, Pandeirada, Cogdill, & LeBreton, 2013; VanArsdall, Nairne, Pandeirada, & Cogdill, 2014). …”

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confidence: 99%

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Natural forces as agents: Reconceptualizing the animate–inanimate distinction

Lowder

Gordon

2015

Cognition

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Research spanning multiple domains of psychology has demonstrated preferential processing of animate as compared to inanimate entities—a pattern that is commonly explained as due to evolutionarily adaptive behavior. Forces of nature represent a class of entities that are semantically inanimate but which behave as if they are animate in that they possess the ability to initiate movement and cause actions. We report an eye-tracking experiment demonstrating that natural forces are processed like animate entities during online sentence processing: they are easier to integrate with action verbs than instruments, and this effect is mediated by sentence structure. The results suggest that many cognitive and linguistic phenomena that have previously been attributed to animacy may be more appropriately attributed to perceived agency. To the extent that this is so, the cognitive potency of animate entities may not be due to vigilant monitoring of the environment for unpredictable events as argued by evolutionary psychologists but instead may be more adequately explained as reflecting a cognitive and linguistic focus on causal explanations that is adaptive because it increases the predictability of events.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 70%

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confidence: 99%

Natural forces as agents: Reconceptualizing the animate–inanimate distinction

Lowder

Gordon

2015

Cognition

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“…As the results indicated that participants were not better at tracking positions associated with animals but were better at remembering what they depicted, this might suggest an advantage in memory (Nairne et al., 2013, 2017) or encoding (Hagen & Laeng, 2017). Indeed, more effective encodings of animals from brief exposures (as implied by the brief target inspections occurring in such tasks, Oksama & Hyönä, 2016) might yield the indicated advantage in reporting where particular animals were localized.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, the task is similar to Experiments 1 and 2, except for making the appearance of the objects at assignment directly relevant for performance. Due to the extensive literature on category-specific deficits for animals in naming, recognition and memory (e.g., Capitani et al., 1994; Låg, 2005; Låg et al., 2006; Laws & Hunter, 2006; Laws & Neve, 1999; Nairne, VanArsdall, & Cogdill, 2017; Nairne, VanArsdall, Pandeirada, Cogdill, & LeBreton, 2013), it seems difficult to purely attribute an effect of superior identity tracking accuracy for animals as stemming from an attentional bias. Consequently, we designed for the acquisition of position accuracy measures as well, by making the task sufficiently difficult, so as to avoid ceiling effects.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chasing Animals With Split Attention: Are Animals Prioritized in Visual Tracking?

2018

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Some evolutionary psychologists have hypothesized that animals have priority in human attention. That is, they should be detected and selected more efficiently than other types of objects, especially man-made ones. Such a priority mechanism should automatically deploy more attentional resources and dynamic monitoring toward animal stimuli than nonanimals. Consequently, we postulated that variations of the multiple object or identity tracking and multiple event monitoring tasks should be particularly suitable paradigms for addressing the animate monitoring hypothesis, given their dynamic properties and dependency on divided attention. We used images of animals and artifacts and found neither a substantial sign of improvement in tracking the positions associated with animal stimuli nor a significant distracting effect of animals. We also failed to observe a significant prioritization in orders of response for positions associated with animals. While we observed an advantage for animals in event monitoring, this appeared to be dependent on properties of the task, as confirmed in further experiments. Moreover, we observed a small but inconclusive advantage for animals in identity accuracy. Thus, under certain conditions, some bias toward animals could be observed, but the evidence was weak and inconclusive. To conclude, effect sizes were generally small and not conclusively in favor of the expected attentional bias for animals. We found moderate to strong evidence that images of animals do not improve positional tracking, do not act as more effective distractors, are not selected prior to artifacts in the response phase, and are not easier to monitor for changes in size.

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“…More recently, VanArsdall, Nairne, Pandeirada, and Blunt (2013) and Nairne, VanArsdall, Pandeirada, Cogdill, and LeBreton (2013) have reported another type of evidence for a functional view of memory. Rather than manipulating the type of encoding, these researchers used items that varied along the animate-inanimate dimension and found that animate items were better remembered than inanimate items (see also Bonin, Gelin, & Bugaiska, in press for further evidence).…”

Section: Limitations Of the Survival Effectmentioning

confidence: 97%

Does the thought of death contribute to the memory benefit of encoding with a survival scenario?

Bugaïska

Mermillod

Bonin

2014

Memory

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Four studies tested whether the thought of death contributes to the survival processing advantage found in memory tests (i.e., the survival effect). In the first study, we replicated the "Dying To Remember" (DTR) effect identified by Burns and colleagues whereby activation of death thoughts led to better retention than an aversive control situation. In Study 2, we compared an ancestral survival scenario, a modern survival scenario and a "life-after-death" scenario. The modern survival scenario and the dying scenario led to higher levels of recall than the ancestral scenario. In Study 3, we used a more salient death-thought scenario in which people imagine themselves on death row. Results showed that the "death-row" scenario yielded a level of recall similar to that of the ancestral survival condition. We also collected ratings of death-related thoughts (Studies 3 and 4) and of survival-related and planning thoughts (Study 4). The ratings indicated that death-related thoughts were induced more by the dying scenarios than by the survival scenarios, whereas the reverse was observed for both survival-related and planning thoughts. The findings are discussed in the light of two contrasting views of the influence of mortality salience in the survival effect.

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Adaptive Memory

Cited by 139 publications

References 28 publications

Natural forces as agents: Reconceptualizing the animate–inanimate distinction

Natural forces as agents: Reconceptualizing the animate–inanimate distinction

Chasing Animals With Split Attention: Are Animals Prioritized in Visual Tracking?

Does the thought of death contribute to the memory benefit of encoding with a survival scenario?

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