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In the Absence of Animacy: Superordinate Category Structure Affects Subordinate Label Verification

Theoretical accounts as well as behavioral studies reporting animacy effects offer inconsistent and sometimes contradictory results. A possible explanation for these inconsistencies may be inadvertent biases in the stimuli selected for test – with category-specific effects driven by characteristics...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Ilic, Olivera, Kovic, Vanja, Styles, Suzy J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3869767/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24376678
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0083282
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author Ilic, Olivera
Kovic, Vanja
Styles, Suzy J.
author_facet Ilic, Olivera
Kovic, Vanja
Styles, Suzy J.
author_sort Ilic, Olivera
collection PubMed
description Theoretical accounts as well as behavioral studies reporting animacy effects offer inconsistent and sometimes contradictory results. A 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) 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.
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spelling pubmed-38697672013-12-27 In the Absence of Animacy: Superordinate Category Structure Affects Subordinate Label Verification Ilic, Olivera Kovic, Vanja Styles, Suzy J. PLoS One Research Article Theoretical accounts as well as behavioral studies reporting animacy effects offer inconsistent and sometimes contradictory results. A 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) 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. Public Library of Science 2013-12-20 /pmc/articles/PMC3869767/ /pubmed/24376678 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0083282 Text en © 2013 Ilic et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Ilic, Olivera
Kovic, Vanja
Styles, Suzy J.
In the Absence of Animacy: Superordinate Category Structure Affects Subordinate Label Verification
title In the Absence of Animacy: Superordinate Category Structure Affects Subordinate Label Verification
title_full In the Absence of Animacy: Superordinate Category Structure Affects Subordinate Label Verification
title_fullStr In the Absence of Animacy: Superordinate Category Structure Affects Subordinate Label Verification
title_full_unstemmed In the Absence of Animacy: Superordinate Category Structure Affects Subordinate Label Verification
title_short In the Absence of Animacy: Superordinate Category Structure Affects Subordinate Label Verification
title_sort in the absence of animacy: superordinate category structure affects subordinate label verification
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3869767/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24376678
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0083282
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