Relationship between a concept’s precision, number of features, dimensions of animacy, and recall

The animacy advantage in memory posits that animate words (e.g., "duck") are more easily remembered than inanimate words (e.g., "chair"). Previous research has demonstrated a relationship between the number of semantic features (NoF) an animate vs. inanimate word possesses and recall performance. However, the proximal cause remains elusive. This study extends this work by introducing a new metric—precision—as a predictor of word recall. Precision is informed by a concept's position in a semantic hierarchy and quantifies the richness of information associated with that concept. Multiple large datasets were utilized to investigate if precision can predict recall more effectively than NoF. I hypothesized that precision, by virtue of capturing nuanced hierarchical information, would account for greater variance in recall than NoF. Analyses revealed that precision was a significant predictor of recall in the final regression model, along with availability and a physical factor of animacy. Importantly, precision was a stronger predictor of free recall than NoF, which supports the primary hypothesis in this study. These results shed new light on the underlying mechanisms of the animacy advantage in memory and offer a more refined understanding of how semantic richness impacts recall in the context of the animacy advantage in memory.