Individual differences in mental imagery do not moderate the animacy advantage in memory

Abstract

The “animacy effect” occurs when participants recall more animate (living) items than inanimate (nonliving) items in various memory tasks. Prior studies have suggested that the effect could stem from participants experiencing greater mental imagery while encoding animate than inanimate words. We examined whether individual differences in mental imagery alter the occurrence of this effect in a free-recall task. In three studies, participants encoded animate and inanimate words under intentional (Study 1) or incidental (Studies 2 and 3) conditions for a free-recall test. Studies 1 (n = 90) and 2 (n = 147) included groups that received or did not receive mental-imagery instructions; no participants in Study 3 (n = 325) received imagery instructions. Participants consistently reported more mental imagery while encoding animate than inanimate words and consistently demonstrated an animacy advantage in recall. This advantage was not moderated by mental-imagery instructions under purposeful encoding conditions (Study 1) but was reduced under incidental conditions where imagery instructions increased the recall of inanimate words (Study 2). None of the studies, however, provided strong evidence that individual differences in mental imagery—whether at the trait level as measured by the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) or during the task as measured by post-task self-report—contributed to or altered the animacy effect. The findings indicate that although greater mental imagery associated with animate than inanimate words can contribute to the animacy effect in free-recall, individual differences in mental-imagery experience do not seem to moderate this effect.