Paired-associate learning, animacy, and imageability effects in the survival advantage

The current study examined animacy and paired-associate learning through a survival-processing paradigm (Nairne et al. in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(2), 263-273, 2007; Schwartz & Brothers, 2014). English-speaking monolingual participants were asked to learn a set of new word translations to improve their chances of survival or to improve their study abroad experience. Animate and inanimate words were included in this task, to further examine animacy effects in cued recall paradigms (Popp & Serra in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(2), 186-201, 2016; VanArsdall et al. in Experimental Psychology, 60(3), 172-178, 2013). Across sentence-completion, matching, and picture-naming tasks, learning was facilitated by the survival context, relative to the study abroad context and an intentional learning condition. Scenario ratings indicated this survival advantage could also be a function of higher imageability ratings for the survival context than for the study abroad context. Replicating previous findings with cued recall, inanimate words were overall better remembered than animate words, across all three tasks, though survival processing facilitated language-learning for both animate and inanimate categories. This 'reverse animacy effect' replicated previous findings by Popp and Serra (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(2), 186-201, 2016), showing animate words can interfere with a participant's ability to create associations with their words, including those in a new language. These results are discussed with regards to the widely-reliable survival and animacy advantages, with a particular emphasis on the role of imageability in this paradigm.