0000000000459047
AUTHOR
Alain Méot
Animacy effects in episodic memory: do imagery processes really play a role?
International audience; Animates are remembered better than inanimates because the former are ultimately more important for fitness than the latter. What, however, are the proximate mechanisms underpinning this effect? We focused on imagery processes as one proximate explanation. We tested whether animacy effects are related to the vividness of mental images (Study 1), or to the dynamic/motoric nature of mental images corresponding to animate words (Study 2). The findings showed that: (1) Animates are not estimated to be more vivid than inanimates; (2) The potentially more dynamic nature of the representations of animates does not seem to be a factor making animates more memorable than inan…
Bonin, P., Nugier, A., Meot, P. (2013). Impact of a minimal social feedback in written picture naming.
International audience
Computational evidence that frequency trajectory theory does not oppose but emerges from age-of-acquisition theory.
International audience; According to the age-of-acquisition hypothesis, words acquired early in life are processed faster and more accurately than words acquired later. Connectionist models have begun to explore the influence of the age/order of acquisition of items (and also their frequency of encounter). This study attempts to reconcile two different methodological and theoretical approaches (proposed by Lambon Ralph & Ehsan, 2006 and Zevin & Seidenberg, 2002) to age-limited learning effects. The current simulations extend the findings reported by Zevin and Seidenberg (2002) that have shown that frequency trajectories (FTs) have limited and specific effects on word-reading tasks. Using th…
Normes d’associations verbales pour 520 mots concrets et étude de leurs relations avec d’autres variables psycholinguistiques
Resume Cet article presente un nouvel ensemble de normes d’associations verbales pour 520 noms concrets du francais. Les normes d’associations verbales sont utiles pour l’etude des processus fondamentaux et representations en jeu dans les habiletes memorielles, de comprehension et production du langage. Les relations qu’entretiennent les normes d’associations verbales avec d’autres variables psycholinguistiques sont analysees. Aussi la stabilite des normes d’associations verbales a-t-elle ete etudiee sur un sous-ensemble de mots de l’etude de Ferrand et Alario (1998). Parmi les principaux resultats, il apparait que : 1. les items se repartissent en trois grands ensembles relativement distin…
At what age did you learn ‘Dog’, ‘Harp’ and other words that you know? The issue of what adult age of acquisition (AoA) estimates really measure
International audience
Psycholinguistic norms for 320 fixed expressions (idioms and proverbs) in French
International audience; We provide psycholinguistic norms for a new set of 160 French idiomatic expressions and 160 proverbs: knowledge, predictability, literality, compositionality, subjective and objective frequency, familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), and length. Different analyses (reliability, descriptive statistics, correlations) performed on the norms are reported and discussed. The norms can be downloaded as supplemental material.
The Behavioral Immune System
International audience; This chapter presents theoretical and empirical arguments in support of the existence of a defense system against pathogens called the Behavioral Immune System, which the authors argue complements the biological immune system and is characterized by cognitive, emotional, motivational, and social aspects
Do animacy effects persist in memory for context?
International audience; The adaptive view of human memory (Nairne, 2010) assumes that animates (e.g., rabbit) are remembered better than inanimates (e.g., glass) because animates are ultimately more important for fitness than inanimates. Previous studies provided evidence for this view by showing that animates were recalled or recognized better than inanimates (e.g., Nairne, VanArsdall, Pandeirada, Cogdill, & LeBreton, 2013), but they did not assess memory for contextual details (e.g., where animates vs. inanimates occurred). In this study, we tested recollection of spatial information (Study 1) and temporal information (Study 2) associated with animate versus inanimate words. The findings …
A new set of 299 pictures for psycholinguistic studies : French norms for name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, age of acquisition, and naming latencies.
Pictures are often used as stimuli in studies of perception, language, and memory. Since performances on different sets of pictures are generally contrasted, stimulus selection requires the use of standardized material to match pictures across different variables. Unfortunately, the number of standardized pictures available for empirical research is rather limited. The aim of the present study is to provide French normative data for a new set of 299 black-and-white drawings. Alario and Ferrand (1999) were closely followed in that the pictures were standardized on six variables: name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisit…
Notre mémoire en mode survie : quand la contamination « booste » les performances mnésiques !
International audience
Do healthy elders, like young adults, remember animates better than inanimates? An adaptive view
International audience; Background/Study Context: It has been found that young adults remember animates better than inanimates. According to the adaptive view of human memory, this is due to the fact that animates are more important for fitness purposes than inanimates. This effect has been ascribed to episodic memory, where older people exhibit difficulties. Methods: Here the authors investigated whether the animacy effect in memory also occurs for healthy older adults. Older and young adults categorized words for their animacy characteristics and were then given an unexpected recognition test on the words using the Remember/Know paradigm. Executive functions were also evaluated using seve…
“It is alive!” Evidence for animacy effects in semantic categorization and lexical decision
AbstractAnimacy is one of the basic semantic features of word meaning and influences perceptual and episodic memory processes. However, evidence that this variable also influences lexicosemantic processing is mixed. As animacy is a semantic variable thought to have evolutionary roots, we first examined its influence in a semantic categorization task that did not make the animacy dimension salient, namely, concrete-abstract categorization. Animates were categorized faster (and more accurately) than inanimates. We then assessed the influence of animacy in two lexical decision experiments. In Experiment 2, we mostly used legal nonwords, whereas in Experiment 3, we varied the context of the non…
MEGALEX- A new mega-study of visual word recognition: Some preliminary data
International audience
MEGALEX: A new mega-study of visual and auditory word recognition in French
International audience; We present a new mega-study (called MEGALEX) involving the collection of visual and auditory lexical decision data for 28,000 French words and the same number of pseudowords. This new mega-study applied the repeated measures design developed by Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, and Brysbaert (2012). For each modality tested (visual vs. auditory), two groups of 40 participants each responded to 14,000 words and the same number of pseudowords for a total duration of 20h (divided over multiple sessions). Collected reaction times were submitted to multiple regression analyses in order to study the influence of continuous lexical variables such as word frequency, word length (in l…
QJE-STD_16-208.R2-Supplemental_Material – Supplemental material for Do animacy effects persist in memory for context?
Supplemental material, QJE-STD_16-208.R2-Supplemental_Material for Do animacy effects persist in memory for context? by Margaux Gelin, Patrick Bonin, Alain Méot and Aurélia Bugaiska in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology