In the absence of animacy: superordinate category structure affects subordinate label verification.

In the absence of animacy: superordinate category structure affects subordinate label verification.

Blog Article

Theoretical accounts as well as behavioral studies reporting animacy effects offer inconsistent and sometimes contradictory results.A Covers possible explanation for these inconsistencies may be inadvertent biases in the stimuli selected for test - with category-specific effects driven by characteristics of test stimuli other than animacy per se.In this study, we pit animacy against feature structure (intra-item variability), in a picture-word matching task.For unimpaired adults, regardless of whether objects were from animate (mammals; insects) FLORADIX IRON TABLETS or inanimate (clothes; musical instruments) superordinate categories, participants were faster to match basic level labels with objects from categories with low intra-item variability (mammals; clothes) than from categories with high intra-item variability (insects; instruments).

Thus, pitting animacy against variability allowed us to clarify that observable differences in processing speed between animals and instruments are systematically driven by the intra-item variability of the superordinate categories, and not by animacy itself.