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Full Text, Thesis (Professional Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology (PhD ClinPsych), School of Applied Psychology, Griffith Health, Words representing animate entities are recalled and recognised more accurately than inanimate words, which has been termed the animacy effect. Understanding the processes responsible for generating the animacy effect is important for a complete understanding of how memory encodes, stores and retrieves words representing animate and inanimate entities. This research project consisted of six experiments, each of which examined the animacy effect in different paradigms. Experiment 1 examined the animacy effect in free recall to determine whether the animacy effect was impacted by the serial position of the words in the study list. Animate words were recalled more accurately than inanimate words and importantly, the magnitude of the animacy effect did not differ significantly between words appearing at the beginning (initial component), middle and at the end of lists (final component). These results provided evidence that the animacy effect is independent of where in a list the words appear and that processes associated with serial position do not explain the animacy effect. Experiment 2 examined whether the build-up of proactive interference (PI) differed between the broad animate and inanimate semantic categories using the Brown-Peterson paradigm. There was a significant build-up of PI over trials 1 to 4 for both animate and inanimate words. The overall magnitude of the build-up of PI did not differ significantly between animate and inanimate words but animate words were more resistant to the build-up of PI between trials 2 and 3 than inanimate words. Animacy effects were present for the first three trials but were eliminated on trial 4, as the build-up of PI peaked. There was a significant release from PI after switching from animate and inanimate words to the opposite category of animacy, as well as when switching to words representing colours. Release from PI was stronger when switching to animate words than switching to inanimate words. The results from Experimen

Words representing animate entities are recalled and recognised more accurately than inanimate words, which has been termed the animacy effect. Understanding the processes responsible for generating the animacy effect is important for a complete understanding of how memory encodes, stores and retrieves words representing animate and inanimate entities. This research project consisted of six experiments, each of which examined the animacy effect in different paradigms. Experiment 1 examined the animacy effect in free recall to determine whether the animacy effect was impacted by the serial position of the words in the study list. Animate words were recalled more accurately than inanimate words and importantly, the magnitude of the animacy effect did not differ significantly between words appearing at the beginning (initial component), middle and at the end of lists (final component). These results provided evidence that the animacy effect is independent of where in a list the words appear and that processes associated with serial position do not explain the animacy effect. Experiment 2 examined whether the build-up of proactive interference (PI) differed between the broad animate and inanimate semantic categories using the Brown-Peterson paradigm. There was a significant build-up of PI over trials 1 to 4 for both animate and inanimate words. The overall magnitude of the build-up of PI did not differ significantly between animate and inanimate words but animate words were more resistant to the build-up of PI between trials 2 and 3 than inanimate words. Animacy effects were present for the first three trials but were eliminated on trial 4, as the build-up of PI peaked. There was a significant release from PI after switching from animate and inanimate words to the opposite category of animacy, as well as when switching to words representing colours. Release from PI was stronger when switching to animate words than switching to inanimate words. The results from Experimen, Thesis (Professional Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology (PhD ClinPsych), School of Applied Psychology, Griffith Health, Full Text