OSF page for Mah et al. - A Direct Replication and Extension of Popp and Serra (2016, Experiment 1): Better Free Recall and Worse Cued Recall of Animal Names than Object Names, Accounting for Semantic Similarity
Free recall performance tends to be better for names or pictures of animate concepts such as animals than for names or pictures of inanimate objects (VanArsdall, Nairne, Pandeirada, & Blunt, 2013). Popp and Serra (2016) replicated this “animacy effect” in free recall but obtained a reverse animacy effect when participants studied words in pairs (animate-animate pairs intermixed with inanimate-inanimate pairs) and were tested with cued recall. That is, cued recall performance was better for inanimate-inanimate pairs than for animate-animate pairs. This OSF page contains materials, data, and analysis scripts for two experiments designed to test the replicability of this surprising "reverse animacy effect" (Experiment 1) and to test the role of animal and object within-category semantic similarity in explaining this effect (Experiment 2). See the respective components on the right for each experiment.
This project initially arose out of a graduate seminar course in which this replication project was conducted. For those interested in the course-based component, we have included several course resources in the "Course Materials" component.
