Matter of Priority

People recall and recognize animate words better than inanimate words, possibly because memory systems were shaped by evolution to prioritize memory for predators, people, and food sources. However, the proximal cause of this animacy advantage is not yet known. Attentional paradigms show an animacy advantage in change detection tasks and in attentional blink tasks, which suggests that the animacy advantage in memory could stem from a prioritization of animate items when allocating attentional resources during encoding. In a series of three experiments, I replicate the animacy effect in a remember-know paradigm (Experiment 1), and test whether better recognition (Experiment 2) and better recall (Experiment 3) for animate items can be traced to enhanced attention at encoding by comparing the animacy effect under conditions of full versus divided attention at encoding. Results demonstrate that word type does not interact with attention condition, suggesting that attention is not the proximal cause of the animacy effect in memory.