The effect of animacy and arousal on prospective memory

Previous memory studies using recall and recognition tasks have shown that participants remember animate entities better than inanimate objects, this observation is called the animacy effect. On the other hand, it has also been found that high-arousal stimuli are better remembered than low-arousal stimuli. This thesis examined the effects of emotional arousal and animacy on location-based prospective memory (PM) by developing and using a virtual 4-day computer game with visual location pictures (different scenes such as a shopping mall or park), some of which were intended action-relevant; others were intended action-irrelevant location pictures. The animacy was manipulated by usingtwo types of PM tasks involving either animates or inanimate objects (e.g., a painter or a sculpture). Also, arousal level was manipulated by using PM tasks with high versus low arousal levels. According to the results, while no significant animacy effect was discovered, a significant effect of arousal was found when the event-based and time-based tasks were examined separately. In other words, tasks with high arousal were remembered more accurately than tasks with low arousal. This study will contribute to the literature in terms of the research question, method, and findings. Keywords: prospective memory, animacy effect, emotional arousal, location.