The Vitality Effect And Development In Item Memory And Source Memory

In the area of memory,animacy effect refers to that people remember animate items better than inanimate items.The aims of the study were as follow,first,we wanted to tested whether animacy effect can show in item memory and source memory,and how does the performance change with age developed.Second,we wanted to test whether the natural selection theory could explain effects in item memory and source memory.Therefore,we designed two studies containing four experiments.Study 1 was formed by two experiments,which mainly studied the animacy effect in item memory with nonwords and words.In experiment 1,we used nonwords as our material,and college students were asked to decide whether the nonword was animate or inanimate by reading a short sentence during learning,then they needed to recollect nonwords they studied before.Result shows that participants' scores of animate nonwords have no difference with inanimate nonwords.In experiment 2,we used meaningful words as our material,college students had to decide the animacy of items,and result shows the classical animacy effect.Study 2 has two parts,which mainly studied the animacy effect in organizational source memory and associative source memory.In experiment 3,we selected college students as participants.Animacy in temporal and spatial source memory was tested.Different animate words were randomly displayed on the left or right side of monitor,and at the same time,words were randomly distributed into three temporal courses.In a later test,participants had to recollect words they had studied as well as the position and time they were displayed.The results show that people have better memory for animate words in source memory for position,but there is no animacy effect in source memory for temporal.In experiment 4,people aged 7,9,11 and 20 are recruited to engage in this study,which is aimed to investigate the animacy effect in source memory for color.During this study,the words were randomly displayed in the color of red or blue.In a later test,participants were asked to recollect the words they studied and its color during the learning period.The results show that all the participants show the animacy effect in item memory no matter how old they are.Participants aged 7 and 9 don't show animacy effect in source memory for color,rather,participants aged 11 and 20 show the expected effect.Conclusions are as follow:(1)animacy effect has boundary conditions in both item memory and source memory.(2)animacy effect in item memory and source memory have different results in different age.(3)natural selection theory can't explain animacy effect all the time.