Encoding Effort Eliminates the Animacy Advantage in Memory When Manipulated with Value-Directed Remembering
Julia N. Keiner, Nicolasa C. Villalobos, T. D. Kelley, Michael J. Serra · 2025
Read Encoding Effort Eliminates the Animacy Advantage in Memory When Manipulated with Value-Directed Remembering by Julia N. Keiner, Nicolasa C. Villalobos, T. D. Kelley, Michael J. Serra (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12837967.txt.
Description
Julia Keiner and three co-authors test why people remember words for living things better than words for objects. Their 2025 study examines the animacy advantage, a steady finding in memory research. The team suspected the edge comes from effort: people naturally pay more attention to living things while learning a list.
Two experiments attached point values to words, pushing learners to try harder on some items. Overall, living words were recalled better, and high-value words were recalled better. Under high effort, though, the living-word edge vanished, because recall of object words rose to match. The authors say effort during learning, not the words themselves, explains much of the classic effect.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Julia N. Keiner, Nicolasa C. Villalobos, T. D. Kelley, Michael J. Serra |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 48 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |