The effect of animacy on metamemory

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the animacy quality of materials affects basic cognitive processes such as memory (i.e., animate stimuli are remembered better than are inanimate stimuli). This is referred to as the animacy effect. Little research has examined, however, whether this effect can be extended to higher cognitive processes such as metamemory.In the present studies, we investigated the influence of animacy on judgments of learning (JOLs) and the underlying basis of the animacy effect, namely, processing fluency and beliefs about the animacy effect. In Experiment 1, participants studied animate and inanimate words and made immediate JOLs. Results revealed that participants gave higher estimates for animate than they did for inanimate words. In Experiments 2a and 2b, we evaluated the contribution of processing fluency to the animacy effect either by measuring self-paced study time or by disrupting fluency by presenting half of the words in an easy or difficult font style. Results from both experiments indicated that processing fluency contributes minimally to the animacy effect. In questionnaire-based Experiment 3, participants estimated hypothetical participants would better remember the animate words than the inanimate words, suggesting the potential role of beliefs on the animacy effect on JOLs. To conclude, these findings suggest that animacy is a reliable cue when people monitor their learning in higher cognitive processes. The beliefs, not processing fluency, contribute substantially to the animacy effect on JOLs.

Beliefs about memory decline in aging do not impact judgments of learning (JOLs): A challenge for belief-based explanations of JOLs

“…As important, in a follow-up experiment, word concreteness impacted participants' JOLs in accord with their beliefs, in that JOLs were higher for concrete than for abstract words. Similar outcomes have been obtained with other cues, such as word frequency (Jia et al, 2016), font size (Mueller et al, 2014), word animacy (P. Li et al, 2016), size of mental images (T. Li et al, 2017), and word pair relatedness (Mueller et al, 2013). Typically, when participants demonstrate beliefs about a cue, the cue also influences JOLs (see the General Discussion for a few exceptions), which together confirm the general hypothesis that participants' beliefs about a cue are used to construct JOLs.…”

Perceptual fluency affects judgments of learning: The font size effect

“…Instead, they suggested that their results were inconsistent with the fluency theory and they encouraged future research to further explore the fluency theory (p. 9). However, after Mueller et al's (2014) study was published, researchers started to acknowledge that fluency may play no role in the font size effect on JOLs (e.g., Ball et al, 2014;Finn & Tauber, 2015;P. Li, Jia, Li, & Li, 2016;Magreehan et al, 2016;Mueller & Dunlosky, 2017;Mueller, Dunlosky, & Tauber, 2016;Susser, Jin, & Mulligan, 2016;Susser, Panitz, Buchin, & Mulligan, 2017;.…”

If it is easy to remember, then it is not secure: Metacognitive beliefs affect password selection

“…For example, judgments of learning and restudy decisions are affected by the belief that font size affects memory (Luna et al, ; Rhodes & Castel, ). Beliefs have been recently advocated to account for several phenomena, such as the effect of animacy (Li, Jia, Li, & Li, ), linguistic frequency (Jia et al, ), or concreteness (Witherby & Tauber, ) on judgments of learning, and have become a very popular explanation for metacognitive judgments.…”