The Animate and The Inanimate

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Elsewhere, animacy is displayed syntactically, such as in endings of modifiers for masc nouns of the second declension. [4] Animacy as a "subgender" [ edit ]

Hale, Kenneth L. (1973). A note on subject–object inversion in Navajo. In B. B. Kachru, R. B. Lees, Y. Malkiel, A. Pietrangeli, & S. Saporta (eds.), Issues in linguistics: Papers in honor of Henry and Renée Kahane, p.300–309. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sidis was a " peridromophile", a term he coined for people fascinated with transportation research and streetcar systems. He wrote a treatise on streetcar transfers, Notes on the Collection of Transfers, that identified means of increasing public transport usage. [31] In 1930, Sidis received a patent for a rotary perpetual calendar that took into account leap years. [32] Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around the globe and is a distinction acquired as early as six months of age. [1]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.

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 As a Harvard man of a generation later, I hope you will become as excited as I am at this discovery that Sidis did go on after college to do the most magnificent thinking and writing. [37] Vendergood language [ edit ] a b c d e f Frarie, Susan E. (1992). Animacy in Czech and Russian. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sidis, William James. "Table of Contents". The Tribes and the States . Retrieved May 25, 2011– via Sidis.net. The difficulties Sidis encountered in dealing with the social structure of a collegiate setting may have shaped opinion against allowing such children to rapidly advance through higher education in his day. Research indicates that a challenging curriculum can relieve social and emotional difficulties gifted children commonly experience. [48] Bibliography [ edit ]Hoffman, P., & Lambon Ralph, M. A. (2013). Shapes, scents and sounds: Quantifying the full multi-sensory basis of conceptual knowledge. Neuropsychologia, 51, 14–25. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.11.009 William James Sidis ( / ˈ s aɪ d ɪ s/; April 1, 1898 – July 17, 1944) was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic skills. He wrote the book The Animate and the Inanimate, published in 1925 (written around 1920), in which he speculated about the origin of life in the context of thermodynamics. Nairne, J. S., Pandeirada, J. N. S., & Thompson, S. R. (2008). Adaptive memory: The comparative value of survival processing. Psychological Science, 19, 176–180. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02064.x

VanArsdall, J. E., Nairne, J. S., Pandeirada, J. N. S., & Blunt, J. R. (2013). Adaptive memory: Animacy processing produces mnemonic advantages. Experimental Psychology, 60, 172–178. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000186 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 In Experiment 1, we found that incidental encoding led to better recall of words referring to animate than inanimate items. In Experiment 2, we found that the animacy effect found in long-term memory with words also extended to picture stimuli. This was of particular interest because, according to the adaptive memory view, our memory systems have evolved to favor the processing of fitness-relevant information, whatever the format in which animate versus inanimate entities are encountered. Second, and more generally, an important and recurring issue in experimental psychology is to ensure that an effect on a behavioral outcome is genuinely attributable to the manipulation carried out and not to another potential (but uncontrolled) variable. This concern applies here as one cannot definitively ascertain that the animacy effect in memory is not attributable to another influential variable. In other words, the animacy effect could be due to (an)other characteristic(s) of the words that is (are) correlated with the animate–inanimate distinction. This concern is particularly relevant in psycholinguistic studies in which researchers aim to establish which specific characteristics of the words play a role in lexical processing. Controlling for stimuli in psycholinguistic experiments has been said to be a difficult challenge (Cutler, 1981). To give an example, a lively debate in the literature on object and word naming has concerned whether the effect of the frequency of encountering words is actually a genuine effect of word frequency or is due to another factor such as age of acquisition (AoA). Some researchers have claimed that word frequency effects in object naming are in fact AoA effects (Bonin, Fayol, & Chalard, 2001), but subsequent studies using better word frequency measures have found effects of both variables (e.g., Bonin et al., 2003b).A growing body of evidence supports the view that our memory systems have evolved to reflect specific selection pressures that belonged to our ancestral past. A core assumption of evolutionary psychologists is that the human mind is composed of cognitive modules that fulfill specific functions (Bell & Buchner, 2012). Therefore, as claimed by Nairne ( 2012), just as the heart serves the function of pumping the blood to the organs, and the different “apps” of our iPhones have specific functions (e.g., to indicate where we are and where to go; to provide information about train times), there is no reason why our memory systems would not have specific functions. Indeed, several studies have shown a memory advantage of processing information in terms of fitness value (Nairne et al., 2009; Nairne et al., 2008; Nairne et al., 2007). More recently, it has been found that processing items along an animacy dimension led to better retention of animate than inanimate items (Nairne et al., in press; VanArsdall et al., 2013). In the present study, we aimed to provide further evidence for the animacy effect in long-term memory. Four experiments were conducted and the findings can be easily summarized. In 1919, shortly after his withdrawal from law school, Sidis was arrested for participating in a socialist May Day parade in Boston that turned violent. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison under the Sedition Act of 1918 by Roxbury Municipal Court Judge Albert F. Hayden. Sidis's arrest featured prominently in newspapers, as his early graduation from Harvard had garnered considerable local celebrity status. During the trial, Sidis said he had been a conscientious objector to the World War I draft, was a socialist, and did not believe in a god like the "big boss of the Christians", but rather in something that is in a way apart from a human being. [17] [18] He later developed his own libertarian philosophy based on individual rights and "the American social continuity". [19] [20] His father arranged with the district attorney to keep Sidis out of prison before his appeal came to trial; instead, his parents held him in their sanatorium in New Hampshire for a year. They took him to California, where he spent another year. At the sanatorium, his parents set about "reforming" him and threatened him with transfer to an insane asylum. [21] Later life (1921–1944) [ edit ] Sidis was born to Jewish emigrants from Ukraine, [1] on April 1, 1898, in New York City. His father, Boris Sidis, had emigrated in 1887 to escape political and antisemitic persecution. [2] His mother, Sarah (Mandelbaum) Sidis, and her family had fled the pogroms in the late 1880s. [3] She attended Boston University and graduated from its School of Medicine in 1897. [4] William was named after his godfather, Boris's friend and colleague, the American philosopher William James. Boris was a psychiatrist and published many books and articles, performing pioneering work in abnormal psychology. He was a polyglot, and his son William also became one at a young age.

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. 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.Capitani, E., Laiacona, M., Mahon, B., & Caramazza, A. (2003). What are the facts of semantic category-specific deficits? A critical review of the clinical evidence. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 20, 213–261. doi: 10.1080/02643290244000266 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 a b c d e f g Klenin, Emily (1983). Animacy in Russian: a new interpretation. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers. 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).