Michael J. Serra
Josefa N. S. Pandeirada
Joshua E. VanArsdall- 1Department of Medical Education, School of Medicine, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Lubbock, TX, United States
- 2William James Center for Research, Department of Education and Psychology, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
- 3Department of Psychology, Elmhurst University, Elmhurst, IL, United States
Editorial on the Research Topic
Animacy in cognition: effects, mechanisms, and theories
1 Animacy in cognition
The distinction between living (animate) and non-living (inanimate) things is a crucial part of our cognition, with animate things typically receiving more attention in our thoughts and actions (Blakemore et al., 2003; Bugaiska et al., 2019; Nairne et al., 2017; Rakison and Poulin-Dubois, 2001). Beyond simply being “alive” or “not alive”, animates differ from inanimates in various ways—they can think, reproduce, move purposefully, and are perceived as being similar to humans (VanArsdall and Blunt, 2022). Living things might have driven the evolution of our cognitive processes given their greater relevance to our survival and reproduction (Nairne et al., 2013, 2017).
Our Research Topic was motivated by two main goals. First, we wanted to highlight new findings on animacy's role in cognition. While cognitive scientists have long studied animacy's influence on attention, perception, language, categories, memory, and other cognitive functions, we continue to refine our understanding of the concept and its influence. Second, we aimed to bridge researchers from various fields—cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, human factors, robotics, and more—to deepen our understanding of animacy's effects on our thoughts and actions. Despite varying in scope and topicality, at a higher level, the articles published in this Research Topic all focused on animacy's effects on attention, perception, memory, or language.
2 Articles in this Research Topic
2.1 Animacy, attention, and perception
Animates naturally capture our attention more than inanimates, and we often perceive animacy in non-living or artificial stimuli that display animate qualities (Rakison and Poulin-Dubois, 2001). However, Loucks et al. showed that not all animate things receive equal attention—mammals, for example, might be prioritized over insects. And though we usually think that perceiving animacy draws our attention, Saito et al. found that the reverse can also happen: we may perceive greater animacy in things that receive continued attention.
Research on animacy perception often focuses on the role of motion (Blakemore et al., 2003). Parovel reviewed how we automatically perceive animacy in simple “Heider-Simmel” animations, arguing that motion helps us identify living things and infer their psychological, emotional, and social characteristics. Torabian and Grossman discussed how children learn to see such movements as goal-directed and eventually attribute them to mental states like beliefs or desires. Animacy perception also has downstream consequences, as Mayer et al. found that people perceive anthropomorphized self-driving vehicles similarly to humans, and that humanlike qualities influence social judgments like responsibility and morality.
2.2 Animacy and memory
People tend to remember animate concepts better than inanimate ones (Nairne et al., 2024). While this effect is well-documented in adults, Bugaiska et al. found it occurs in older children but possibly not younger ones, likely due to their still-developing episodic memory skills. Serra and DeYoung showed that the animacy advantage in free-recall exists under both computer-paced and self-paced conditions, and that while participants' beliefs about animacy do not impact the animacy effect directly (DeYoung and Serra, 2021), they can influence processing decisions (e.g., self-paced study) and the size of the effect as a result. Mah et al. replicated Popp and Serra's (2016) finding of an inanimate advantage in cued-recall tasks, investigating (and ruling out) semantic similarity among animates as an explanation.
2.3 Animacy and language
Living things tend to take precedence over non-living things in our speech and writing (Branigan et al., 2008). Czypionka et al. examined how easily people process German noun–noun pairs and found greater processing fluency when more animate words were included (e.g., “food bowl” vs. “dog food” vs. “sheep dog”). Lobben and Laeng used Construal Level Theory to explain linguistic puzzles involving prominence hierarchies (like animacy), concluding prominent concepts are less psychologically distant from the self. Sá-Leite et al. reviewed the picture-word interference paradigm, a tool for measuring retrievability, and noted that many studies have neglected animacy despite its known enhancement of cognitive and linguistic processing. Westbury explored how people decide if something is animate or not, challenging the notion that this is a simple, binary classification (see also VanArsdall and Blunt, 2022). His analyses suggest that people rely heavily on categorical family resemblance to judge animacy.
3 Final thoughts
Together, the articles in this Research Topic highlight key findings and new insights on animacy's role in cognition. The articles on attention and perception not only identify factors that lead to the perception of animacy, but more uniquely how animacy affects downstream judgments and decisions that we make. The memory studies identify new conditions that augment, suppress, and even moderate the animacy advantage in memory; these are important for understanding the process(es) responsible for the effects of animacy on memory. The reasons for the prominence of animacy in language, and the downstream effects of that prioritization, are explored in the articles on language. We hope that by bringing together these diverse insights, this Research Topic deepens our understanding of how animacy influences cognition and inspires further research.
Author contributions
MS: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Validation, Project administration, Conceptualization. JP: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. JV: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Conceptualization.
Funding
The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. JP's contribution was funded with national funds from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (refs: UID/04810/2020 and CEECIND/01914/2017).
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Frontiers and the editors of Frontiers in Psychology: Cognition for supporting the present Research Topic. They also thank all the researchers who submitted manuscripts and those who reviewed manuscripts for this Research Topic.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher's note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
References
Blakemore, S. J., Boyer, P., Pachot-Clouard, M., Meltzoff, A., Segebarth, C., and Decety, J. (2003). The detection of contingency and animacy from simple animations in the human brain. Cereb. Cortex 13, 837–844. doi: 10.1093/cercor/13.8.837
Branigan, H. P., Pickering, M. J., and Tanaka, M. (2008). Contributions of animacy to grammatical function assignment and word order during production. Lingua 118, 172–189. doi: 10.1016/j.lingua.2007.02.003
Bugaiska, A., Grégoire, L., Camblats, A. M., Gelin, M., Méot, A., and Bonin, P. (2019). Animacy and attentional processes: evidence from the Stroop task. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 72, 882–889. doi: 10.1177/1747021818771514
DeYoung, C. M., and Serra, M. J. (2021). Judgments of learning reflect the animacy advantage for memory, but not beliefs about the effect. Metacogn. Learn. 16, 711–747. doi: 10.1007/s11409-021-09264-w
Nairne, J. S., Pandeirada, J. N. S., Fernandes, N. L., and Félix, S. B. (2024). “Adaptive memory,” in Reference Module in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Psychology, ed. J. Stein (Amsterdam: Elsevier). doi: 10.1016/B978-0-443-15754-7.00016-X
Nairne, J. S., VanArsdall, J. E., and Cogdill, M. (2017). Remembering the living: episodic memory is tuned to animacy. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 26, 22–27. doi: 10.1177/0963721416667711
Nairne, J. S., VanArsdall, J. E., Pandeirada, J. N., Cogdill, M., and LeBreton, J. M. (2013). Adaptive memory: the mnemonic value of animacy. Psychol. Sci. 24, 2099–2105. doi: 10.1177/0956797613480803
Popp, E. Y., and Serra, M. J. (2016). Adaptive memory: animacy enhances free-recall but impairs cued-recall. J. Exp. Psychol. 42, 186–201. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000174
Rakison, D. H., and Poulin-Dubois, D. (2001). Developmental origin of the animate–inanimate distinction. Psychol. Bull. 127, 209–228. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.127.2.209
Keywords: animacy, animacy effects, animate, inanimate, cognition, perception, memory, language
Citation: Serra MJ, Pandeirada JNS and VanArsdall JE (2024) Editorial: Animacy in cognition: effects, mechanisms, and theories. Front. Psychol. 15:1508218. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1508218
Received: 09 October 2024; Accepted: 16 October 2024;
Published: 05 November 2024.
Edited and reviewed by: Antonino Vallesi, University of Padua, Italy
Copyright © 2024 Serra, Pandeirada and VanArsdall. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Michael J. Serra, bWljaGFlbC5zZXJyYSYjeDAwMDQwO3R0dWhzYy5lZHU=