Encoding Effort Eliminates the Animacy Advantage in Memory When Manipulated with Value-Directed Remembering

People are more likely to remember words that refer to living/animate things than nonliving/inanimate things across various memory tasks, yielding an animacy advantage in recall. We tested an encoding-effort explanation for this effect: that people naturally devote more attention or encoding effort to living things over nonliving things during encoding, producing the effect. We used both between-participants (Experiment 1) and within-participants (Experiment 2) manipulations of value (i.e., participants earned a different number of points for each word they recalled) to affect encoding effort at the task and item level, respectively. We predicted that leading participants to devote more encoding effort to the items (in particular, the inanimate words) would reduce or even eliminate the animacy advantage, as has been found in some prior studies that used mental-imagery manipulations. Overall, participants recalled more animate words than inanimate words and recalled more words under higher-effort than under lower-effort conditions. In line with our predictions, these two factors interacted: the animacy effect was eliminated under higher-effort conditions, as these conditions led to an increase in the recall of inanimate words compared to animate words. The results therefore support an encoding-effort explanation for the animacy advantage in free-recall performance.