The Animate and The Inanimate

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Paivio, A. (2007). Mind and its evolution: A dual coding theoretical approach. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Some consider the system to be based on marking inanimacy in which case the gen-acc distinguishes a "non-inanimate" subgender of nouns and modifiers, [5] and others claim that ultimately it is indeed animacy that is marked. [4] Sinhala [ edit ] These findings replicate in French the animacy effect in correct free-recall initially reported by Nairne et al. ( in press) in English in an intentional memory task. The effect cannot be attributable to the fact that animate words were processed for a longer time than inanimate words because we found that animate words were categorized faster than inanimate words. Burns, D. J., Burns, S. A., & Hwang, A. J. (2011). Adaptive memory: Determining the proximate mechanisms responsible for the memorial advantages of survival processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37, 206–218. doi: 10.1037/a0021325 Sidis, William James (1926). Notes on the Collection of Transfers . Retrieved May 25, 2011– via Sidis.net.

Sidis, William James. "Native American History". The Tribes and the States . Retrieved May 25, 2011– via Sidis.net. Sidis Gets Year and Half in Jail". Boston Herald. May 14, 1919 . Retrieved January 12, 2018– via Sidis.net.

Introduction

It might be asked whether the animacy effect was driven by congruity. For instance, it could be that individuals relied on the animate category to make decisions about the category the item belonged to (e.g., “is this a living thing?”) and to cue performance during retrieval. However, we do not think the congruency account likely because the participants were instructed to decide whether a given word referred to an animate or an inanimate thing, each decision requiring a specific response, pressing a different key. It is important to stress that the participants were given a brief explanation about what is meant by animate and inanimate before starting the categorization task. Thus, the animate category was not defined in a more positive way than the inanimate category. This was also the case in VanArsdall et al.’s ( 2013) study in which the participants had to use a six-point scale anchored at one end by an object and at the other by a living thing. Moreover, the animacy effect was replicated many times with intentional learning in that study, in which attention was not drawn to the animacy dimension. Masson, M. E. J. (2011). A tutorial on a practical Bayesian alternative to null hypothesis significance testing. Behavior Research Methods, 43, 679–690. doi: 10.3758/s13428-010-0049-5 Although nouns in Japanese are not marked for animacy, it has two existential/ possessive verbs; one for implicitly animate nouns (usually humans and animals) and one for implicitly inanimate nouns (often non-living objects and plants). The verb iru ( いる, also written 居る) is used to show the existence or possession of an animate noun. The verb aru ( ある, sometimes written 在る when existential or 有る when possessive) is used to show the existence or possession of an inanimate noun. According to Nairne ( in press), the criticisms raised against the evolutionary account of the survival memory advantage have come from a misunderstanding between ultimate and proximate explanations. Without going into the details of the line of argument, he defines ultimate explanations as “statements about the function of a trait and ‘why’ it would have been selected by nature during an evolutionary process,” whereas proximate explanations “focus on the mechanisms that produced the trait—that is, they are statements about ‘how’ the trait works and the condition under which the trait is likely to be expressed” (p. 309). Following this distinction, memory evolved because it solved specific problems related to fitness (e.g., remembering information processed for its survival value as indexed by the survival memory paradigm). One consequence of memory system evolution is that information relevant to survival would be afforded special status. However, the proximate mechanisms underpinning the retention advantages may well be elaborative, distinctive or self-related encoding.

Gardiner, J. M. (1988). Functional aspects of recollective experience. Memory & Cognition, 16, 309–313. doi: 10.3758/BF03197041 Manley, Jared L. ("James Thurber") (August 14, 1937). "Where Are They Now? April Fool!". The New Yorker. pp.22–26 . Retrieved February 13, 2020– via sidis.net.

After returning to the East Coast in 1921, Sidis was determined to live an independent and private life. He only took work running adding machines or other fairly menial tasks. He worked in New York City and became estranged from his parents. It took years before he was legally cleared to return to Massachusetts, and he was concerned for years about his risk of arrest. He obsessively collected streetcar transfers, wrote self-published periodicals, and taught small circles of interested friends his version of American history. In 1933, Sidis passed a Civil Service exam in New York, but scored a low ranking of 254. [22] In a private letter, Sidis wrote that this was "not so encouraging". [22] In 1935, he wrote an unpublished manuscript, The Tribes and the States, which traces Native American contributions to American democracy. [23]

Nairne, J. S. (2010). Adaptive memory: Evolutionary constraints on remembering. In B. H. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 53, pp. 1–32). Burlington, VT: Academic Press. Howe, M. L., & Derbish, M. H. (in press). Adaptive memory: Survival processing, ancestral relevance, and the role of elaboration. In B. L. Schwartz, M. L. Howe, M. P. Toglia, & H. Otgaar (Eds.), What is adaptive about adaptive memory? New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Animate pictures were categorized significantly faster ( M = 1,156 ms, SD = 377) than inanimate pictures ( M = 1,279 ms, SD = 439), t(29) = 3.28, p< .01. More animate pictures were correctly recalled ( M = 6.63, SD = 2.63) than inanimate pictures ( M = 3.70, SD = 2.31), yielding a reliable main effect of the Type of Picture factor, t(29) = 3.28, p< .01. With regard to extralist intrusions, animate stimuli ( M = 0.83, SD = 1.02) did not yield more intrusions than did inanimate ones ( M = 0.70, SD = 1.09), t(29) = 0.47. Cohen, J. D., MacWhinney, B., Flatt, M., & Provost, J. (1993). PsyScope: A new graphic interactive environment for designing psychology experiments. Behavioral Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 25, 257–271. doi: 10.3758/BF03204507 In this experiment, we tested whether the animacy effect in memory obtained with words would also be found with pictures. Taking a functionalist view of human memory (Nairne, 2010), this effect was clearly anticipated, particularly as the processing of pictures preceded that of language in human evolution. In effect, according to the adaptive memory view, our memory systems have evolved to favor the processing of fitness-relevant information. Therefore, whatever the format of presentation of animate versus inanimate entities, we predicted that the former would be remembered better than the latter; this prediction was clearly borne out. In line with previous studies (Paivio, 1971; Rajaram, 1996), comparison of the findings of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed better memory performance with pictures than with words. The first two experiments support previous findings (Nairne et al., in press; VanArsdall et al., 2013) of the robustness of the animacy recall advantage.Johansen, Bruce E. (Fall 1989). "William James Sidis' 'Tribes and States': An Unpublished Exploration of Native American Contributions to Democracy". Northeast Indian Quarterly. 6 (3): 24–29 – via eric.ed.gov. Could the animacy effect be attributable to another factor, namely a by-product of other more general factors? We were careful when selecting our stimuli to control for a large number of important factors that could potentially influence word processing and long-term encoding. Since certain studies have suggested that the quality of memory traces is dependent upon the richness of the stimuli in terms of semantic or motoric features (Hargreaves et al., 2012), and given (1) the findings of our Experiment 3 that suggest that the memory traces of animate stimuli are of better quality than those of inanimate stimuli, and (2) the findings of Hoffman and Lambon Ralph ( 2013) suggesting that animate stimuli are richer in terms of sensory knowledge than inanimate stimuli, our Experiment 4 tested whether the animacy effect in memory might be related to differences in terms of sensory features. The outcome of this experiment was clear: Neither our stimuli nor those used by Nairne et al. ( in press) differed reliably on this dimension. Of course, we cannot definitively rule out the possibility that the animacy effect is due to another potent variable rather than the status of animacy per se. But since we were able to control for a large number of potentially important variables, the weight of evidence reported in the present study, together with recent evidence on words (Nairne et al., in press) and nonwords (VanArsdall et al., 2013), strongly suggests that animacy has a strong influence on long-term memory. Evidence for a functional view of memory For example, syncretism in Polish conditioned by referential animacy results in forms like the following: Nairne, J. S., VanArsdall, J. E., Pandeirada, J. N. S., Cogdill, M., & LeBreton, J. M. (in press). Adaptive memory: The mnemonic value of animacy. Psychological Science. doi: 10.1177/0956797613480803

Animacy occurs as a subgender of nouns and modifiers (and pronouns only when adjectival) and is primarily reflected in modifier-head agreement (as opposed to subject-predicate agreement). Sidis wrote The Animate and the Inanimate to elaborate his thoughts on the origin of life, cosmology, and the potential reversibility of the second law of thermodynamics through Maxwell's Demon, among other things. It was published in 1925, but it has been suggested that Sidis was working on the theory as early as 1916. [34] One motivation for the theory appears to be to explain psychologist and philosopher William James's "reserve energy" theory, which proposed that people subjected to extreme conditions could use "reserve energy". Sidis's own "forced prodigy" upbringing was a result of testing the theory. The work is one of the few that Sidis did not write under a pseudonym. Wiggett, A., Pritchard, I. C., & Downing, P. E. (2009). Animate and inanimate objects in human visual cortex: Evidence for task-independent category effects. Neuropsychologia, 47, 3111–3117. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.07.008 Sidis's upbringing emphasized intellectual pursuits at the expense of other qualities. In 1909, The New York Times derisively portrayed Sidis as "a wonderfully successful result of a scientific forcing experiment". [5] His mother maintained that newspaper accounts of her son bore little resemblance to him. Alario, F.-X., & Ferrand, L. (1999). A set of 400 pictures standardized for French: Norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisition. Behavior Research Methods Instruments & Computers, 31, 531–552.

Context Matters

After a group of Harvard students physically threatened Sidis, his parents secured him a job at the William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Letters, Science, and Art (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, as a mathematics teaching assistant. He arrived at Rice in December 1915 at age 17. He was a graduate fellow working toward his doctorate. A group of 30 adults (mean age 23.63 years) taken from the same pool as in Experiment 1 and having the same characteristics took part in the experiment. Stimuli Gowdy, Larry Neal (October 20, 2013). "Myths, Facts, Lies, and Humor About William James Sidis – Part One". thelogics.org . Retrieved March 4, 2016. In The Animate and the Inanimate, Sidis writes that the universe is infinite and contains sections of "negative tendencies" where [35] the laws of physics are reversed, juxtaposed with "positive tendencies", which swap over epochs of time. He writes that there was no "origin of life": life has always existed and has only changed through evolution. Sidis adopted Eduard Pflüger's cyanogen-based life theory, and cites "organic" things such as almonds that have cyanogen that does not kill. Because cyanogen is normally highly toxic, almonds are a strange anomaly. Sidis describes his theory as a fusion of the mechanistic model of life and the vitalist model, as well as entertaining the notion that life came to earth from asteroids (as advanced by Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz). Sidis also writes that functionally speaking, stars are "alive" and undergo an eternally repeating light-dark cycle, reversing the second law in the dark portion of the cycle. [36] Nairne, J. S. (in press). Adaptive memory: Controversies and future directions. In B. L. Schwartz, M. L. Howe, M. P. Toglia, & H. Otgaar (Eds.), What is adaptive about adaptive memory? New York, NY: Oxford University Press.