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EDITORIAL article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1508218
This article is part of the Research Topic Animacy in Cognition: Effects, Mechanisms, and Theories View all 13 articles

Editorial: Animacy in Cognition: Effects, Mechanisms, and Theories

Provisionally accepted
Michael J. Serra Michael J. Serra 1,2*Josefa N. Pandeirada Josefa N. Pandeirada 3Joshua E. Vanarsdall Joshua E. Vanarsdall 4
  • 1 Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Lubbock, United States
  • 2 Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, United States
  • 3 Department of Education and Psychology, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
  • 4 Elmhurst University, Elmhurst, Illinois, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Research on animacy perception often focuses on the role of motion (Blakemore et al., 2003). 36Parovel reviewed how we automatically perceive animacy in simple "Heider-Simmel" animations, 37arguing that helps us identify living things and infer their psychological, emotional, and 38 social characteristics. animates as an explanation. 53 Living things tend to take precedence over nonliving things in our speech and writing ( Together, the articles in this collection highlight key findings and new insights on animacy's role in 67 cognition. The articles on attention and perception not only identify factors that lead to the perception 68 of animacy, but more uniquely how animacy affects downstream judgments and decisions that we 69 make. The memory studies identify new conditions that augment, suppress, and even moderate the 70 animacy advantage in memory; these are important for understanding the process(es) responsible for 71 the effects of animacy on memory. The reasons for the prominence of animacy in language, and the 72 downstream effects of that prioritization, are explored in the articles on language. We hope that by 73 bringing together these diverse insights, this collection deepens our understanding of how animacy 74 influences cognition and inspires further research. 75 76

    Keywords: animacy, animacy effects, animate, inanimate, Cognition, Perception, Memory, language 1 Animacy in Cognition

    Received: 09 Oct 2024; Accepted: 16 Oct 2024.

    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) or licensor 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, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Lubbock, United States

    Disclaimer: 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.