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. Thomas E. Payne, 1997. Describing morphosyntax: A guide for field linguists. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-58224-5. 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. Animate words were categorized reliably faster ( M = 960 ms, SD = 219) than inanimate words ( M = 1,064 ms, SD = 234), t(39) = 5.58, p< .001. More animate words were correctly recalled ( M = 4.78, SD = 2.08) than inanimate words ( M = 2.08, SD = 1.40), yielding a reliable main effect of the Type of Word factor, t(39) = 7.50, p< .001. With regard to extralist intrusions, animate words ( M = 1.05, SD = 1.08) did not yield more intrusions than inanimate ones ( M = 1.10, SD = 0.90), t(39) = 0.24. Kroneisen, M., Erdfelder, E., & Buchner, A. (2013). The proximate memory mechanism underlying the survival processing effect: Richness of encoding or interactive imagery? Memory, 21, 494–502. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2012.741603

Animacy can also condition the nature of the morphologies of split-ergative languages. In such languages, participants more animate are more likely to be the agent of the verb, and therefore are marked in an accusative pattern: unmarked in the agent role and marked in the patient or oblique role. 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. First and foremost, it should be remembered that VanArsdall et al. ( 2013) initially found that animate items were remembered better than inanimate items using nonwords. The use of nonwords was justified by the authors by the fact that using words would require matching the stimuli on numerous dimensions and also because “demonstrating that people are more likely to remember animals than household objects might not be seen as particularly convincing by the community of memory researchers” (p. 173). Since the same nonwords were used (with different participants) with animate and inanimate properties in VanArsdall et al.’s ( 2013) study, it is difficult to assume that the animacy effect was due to uncontrolled properties of the stimuli. Somewhat paradoxically, in a further publication (Nairne et al., in press), the authors investigated the animacy effect in long-term memory using words (and thus contrary to their claim that finding an animacy effect with words would not be accepted by the research community). In Experiment 4, we tested whether the animacy effect in memory could be driven by the fact that animate entities are richer in terms of sensory experience than inanimate items. To do this, we collected SER for the words used in Experiments 1 and 2 plus the French translation of the words used in Nairne et al.’s ( in press) Experiment 2. a b c Szewczyk, Jakub M.; Schriefers, Herbert (2010). "Is animacy special? ERP correlates of semantic violations and animacy violations in sentence processing". Brain Research. 1368: 208–221. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2010.10.070. PMID 21029726. S2CID 33461799.Examples of languages in which an animacy hierarchy is important include the Totonac language in Mexico and the Southern Athabaskan languages (such as Western Apache and Navajo) whose animacy hierarchy has been the subject of intense study. The Tamil language has a noun classification based on animacy. a b c d e f "The Logics – Was William James Sidis the Smartest Man on Earth?". Thelogics.org. Archived from the original on December 20, 2014 . Retrieved November 26, 2014. 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. a b Bates, Stephen (2011). "The Prodigy and the Press: William James Sidis, Anti-Intellectualism, and Standards of Success". J&MC Quarterly. 88 (2): 374–397. doi: 10.1177/107769901108800209. S2CID 145637498.

In fiction, the Danish author Morten Brask's [ da] novel The Perfect Life of William Sidis (2011) is based on Sidis's life. Another novel based on Sidis's life was written by the German author Klaus Caesar Zehrer [ de] in 2017. [46] In education discussions [ edit ] Frishberg, Nancy. (1972). Navajo object markers and the great chain of being. In J. Kimball (ed.), Syntax and semantics, vol.1, p.259–266. New York: Seminar Press. Evans, G., Lambon Ralph, M., & Woollams, A. (2012). What’s in a word? A parametric study of semantic influences on visual word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19, 325–31. doi: 10.3758/s13423-011-0213-7 Abrams, R. A., & Christ, S. E. (2003). Motion onset captures attention. Psychological Science, 14, 427–432. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.01458

References

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] Renselle, Doug. "A Review of Kathleen Montour's William James Sidis, The Broken Twig". Quantonics.com . Retrieved February 13, 2020. Bates, Stephen (June 20, 1926). "Youthful Prodigies at Genius Meeting" (PDF). The New York Times. p.8 . Retrieved January 16, 2023.

From an evolutionary perspective, the animacy effect – the observation that animate items such as “dog” and “man” are better remembered than inanimate items such as “box” and “flute” (Nairne et al., 2013) – can be interpreted in terms of the relevance of animate items for the survival of early humans. Surviving in an ancestral environment required one to find food, avoid predators, form alliances, and reproduce. In most cases, animate items are more likely to be relevant to these goals than inanimate items because animate items can be a food source, a threat, or a potential friend or mate. Nairne et al. ( 2013) asked participants to study a list of words, half of which referred to animate items and half of which referred to inanimate items. On a subsequent recall test, more animate items were recalled than inanimate items, despite being equated with inanimate items on many other dimensions, such as concreteness, imageability, and number of letters. The animacy effect extends to cued recall (VanArsdall et al., 2014; but see Popp & Serra, 2016), and to recognition of nonwords newly learned to be animate versus inanimate (e.g., “FRAV” paired with “speaks French” during learning vs. “JOTE” paired with “made of wood”; VanArsdall et al., 2013). 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 In Spanish, the preposition a (meaning "to" or "at") has gained a second role as a marker of concrete animate direct objects: Howe, M. L., & Otgaar, H. (2013). Proximate mechanisms and the development of adaptive memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22, 16–22. doi: 10.1177/0963721412469397Nairne, J. S., Pandeirada, J. N. S. (2010b). Memory functions. In The Corsini encyclopedia of psychology and behavioral science (4th ed., Vol. 3, pp. 977–979). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Gowdy, Larry Neal (October 20, 2013). "Myths, Facts, Lies, and Humor About William James Sidis – Part One". thelogics.org . Retrieved March 4, 2016. Pratt, J., Radulescu, P. V., Guo, R. M., & Abrams, R. A. (2010). It’s alive! animate motion captures visual attention. Psychological Science, 21, 1724–1730. doi: 10.1177/0956797610387440 Although Experiment 1 of VanArsdall et al.’s ( 2013) study used recognition memory for nonwords, the animacy effect has previously only been reported with words in free-recall tasks (Nairne et al., in press). The aim of Experiment 3 was therefore to assess whether it would also appear in a recognition task. More importantly, we collected “remember” and “know” responses for each item judged as “recognized” since such responses are thought to reflect the kind of memory trace formed during encoding. Two important findings emerged from the analyses. First of all, the animacy property enhanced the quantity of recognized words, as more animate than inanimate words were recognized. Secondly, animate words yielded higher R-responses than inanimate words, indicating greater conscious awareness of encoding these stimuli, suggesting that animacy enhances the quality of memory traces leading to greater episodic retrieval. This finding suggests that the participants were spontaneously engaged in elaborative encoding for animate words. These findings also support the idea that the mnemonic advantage of animate words is provided by the recollection component. From an evolutionary perspective, the key uses of episodic memory are to maintain a sense of self-continuity, to ensure successful social interaction, and to direct future behavior on the basis of information about past events (Raby & Clayton, 2012). Given the functions of episodic memory and the properties of animate objects (e.g., animates can act whereas inanimates move only when something/someone acts on them; animates can know, perceive, emote, learn and think; Gelman & Spelke, 1981), it is likely that animate objects will be recollected with more episodic details than inanimate objects. Seitz, Robert N. (2002). "Review of Amy Wallace, The Prodigy (1986)". High IQ News. Archived from the original on June 2, 2008 . Retrieved February 5, 2016.

Sidis Gets Year and Half in Jail". Boston Herald. May 14, 1919 . Retrieved January 12, 2018– via Sidis.net. After his death, Sidis's sister Helena said that he had an IQ "the very highest that had ever been obtained", as reported in Abraham Sperling's 1946 book Psychology for the Millions. [41] Sperling wrote: The words were presented on a Macintosh (iMac) computer running the PsyScope version 1.2.5 software (Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt, & Provost, 1993). Procedure The animacy effect in long-term memory has thus far been obtained with nonword (VanArsdall et al., 2013) and word (Nairne et al., in press, and Exp. 1 of the present study) stimuli. One unexplored issue is whether the animacy effect is also obtained with pictures. It is well known that information is more likely to be recollected when it is presented in pictures rather than in words (Paivio, 1971; Rajaram, 1996). Because processing pictures (i.e., imagery) preceded the processing of language (e.g., words) in the evolution of human memory (Paivio, 2007), on the basis of a functionalist view of human memory (Nairne, 2010), whereby memory has evolved to favor the processing of fitness-relevant information, we expected to find that pictures of animate items would yield better recall than pictures of inanimate items. Examining this hypothesis would provide valuable information regarding the robustness of the animacy recall advantage. Method Participants Gelman, R., & Spelke, E. (1981). The development of thoughts about animate and inanimate objects: Implications for research on social cognition. In J. H. Flavell & L. Ross (Eds.), Social cognitive development: Frontiers and possible futures (pp. 43–66). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Heinze, Andrew R. (2006). Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-12775-0. Sidis, William James. "Letter to Julian Huxley re The Animate and the Inanimate, Monday, August 28, 1916". Sidis.net . Retrieved August 23, 2019.