Examining the contributions of item-specific and relational processing to the animacy effect in free recall

Words denoting animate beings are better recalled than words denoting inanimate objects. Here we examine the contributions of item-specific and relational processing to the animacy effect in free recall. According to the item-specific and relational processing framework, free recall particularly benefits when both item-specific processing, which supports the discrimination among retrieval candidates, and relational processing, which supports the generation of retrieval candidates, have occurred during encoding. Applied to the animacy effect, animate words may be better recalled than inanimate words because animate words receive both item-specific and relational processing automatically, whereas inanimate words receive both forms of processing to a lesser extent. It follows from this assumption that the animacy effect should be reduced to the extent that external factors such as the structure of the list of to-be-recalled words and the orienting task promote both forms of processing for inanimate words. We tested this assumption systematically across four experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, in which a non-salient list structure that promotes item-specific processing was used, an orienting task that promotes relational processing significantly reduced the animacy effect. In Experiments 3 and 4, in which a salient list structure that promotes relational processing was used, an orienting task that promotes item-specific processing also reduced the animacy effect, but the reduction was very small. Promoting relational processing reduced the animacy effect more than promoting item-specific processing, consistent with the assumption of a comparatively stronger contribution of relational processing to the animacy effect in free recall.