Exploring the animacy effect in focal prospective memory tasks: When animates don’t stand out

Abstract

The animacy effect refers to a memory advantage for animates/living beings as compared to inanimates/nonliving things. So far, the animacy effect has been investigated mostly in retrospective memory. Given that memory serves a future-oriented function, and considering the adaptive significance of animacy, it has been proposed that it should also confer an advantage in prospective memory (i.e., memory for intentions/actions to-be-performed in the future). Recent research reported an animacy effect in nonfocal event-based prospective memory tasks. The present work explored this effect in focal prospective memory. In a series of five studies, conducted in different countries and languages, we employed various ongoing tasks. Across all studies, no differences in prospective memory performance between animates and inanimates were found. This result held in a sign-test including all participants (N = 408 young adults) for a more powered analysis. Also, no differences between animates and inanimates were obtained in the baseline and filler trials. These results are discussed considering the mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the effect in retrospective memory tasks, namely attention-prioritization and richness of encoding. Overall, our results are partially explained by the attention-prioritization account of the animacy effect and also provide support for the Multiprocess Framework.