We developed affective norms for 1,121 Italian words in order to provide researchers with a highly controlled tool for the study of verbal processing. This database was developed from translations of the 1,034 English words present in the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999) and from words taken from Italian semantic norms (Montefinese, Ambrosini, Fairfield, & Mammarella, Behavior Research Methods, 45, 440-461, 2013). Participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a Web survey procedure. Participants also provided evaluations of three subjective psycholinguistic indexes (familiarity, imageability, and concreteness), and five objective psycholinguistic indexes (e.g., word frequency) were also included in the resulting database in order to further characterize the Italian words. We obtained a typical quadratic relation between valence and arousal, in line with previous findings. We also tested the reliability of the present ANEW adaptation for Italian by comparing it to previous affective databases and performing split-half correlations for each variable. We found high split-half correlations within our sample and high correlations between our ratings and those of previous studies, confirming the validity of the adaptation of ANEW for Italian. This database of affective norms provides a tool for future research about the effects of emotion on human cognition.

Semantic norms for properties produced by native speakers are valuable tools for researchers interested in the structure of semantic memory and in category-specific semantic deficits in individuals following brain damage. The aims of this study were threefold. First, we sought to extend existing semantic norms by adopting an empirical approach to category (Exp. 1) and concept (Exp. 2) selection, in order to obtain a more representative set of semantic memory features. Second, we extensively outlined a new set of semantic production norms collected from Italian native speakers for 120 artifactual and natural basic-level concepts, using numerous measures and statistics following a featurelisting task (Exp. 3b). Finally, we aimed to create a new publicly accessible database, since only a few existing databases are publicly available online.

No abstract

According to the feature-based model of semantic memory, concepts are described by a set of semantic features that contribute, with different weights, to the meaning of a concept. Interestingly, this theoretical framework has introduced numerous dimensions to describe semantic features. Recently, we proposed a new parameter to measure the importance of a semantic feature for the conceptual representation-that is, semantic significance. Here, with speeded verification tasks, we tested the predictive value of our index and investigated the relative roles of conceptual and featural dimensions on the participants' performance. The results showed that semantic significance is a good predictor of participants' verification latencies and suggested that it efficiently captures the salience of a feature for the computation of the meaning of a given concept. Therefore, we suggest that semantic significance can be considered an effective index of the importance of a feature in a given conceptual representation. Moreover, we propose that it may have straightforward implications for feature-based models of semantic memory, as an important additional factor for understanding conceptual representation.

In everyday life, human beings can report memories of past events that did not occur or that occurred differently from the way they remember them because memory is an imperfect process of reconstruction and is prone to distortion and errors. In this recognition study using word stimuli, we investigated whether a specific operationalization of semantic similarity among concepts can modulate false memories while controlling for the possible effect of associative strength and word co-occurrence in an old-new recognition task. The semantic similarity value of each new concept was calculated as the mean cosine similarity between pairs of vectors representing that new concept and each old concept belonging to the same semantic category. Results showed that, compared with (new) low-similarity concepts, (new) high-similarity concepts had significantly higher probability of being falsely recognized as old, even after partialling out the effect of confounding variables, including associative relatedness and lexical co-occurrence. This finding supports the feature-based view of semantic memory, suggesting that meaning overlap and sharing of semantic features (which are greater when more similar semantic concepts are being processed) have an influence on recognition performance, resulting in more false alarms for new high-similarity concepts. We propose that the associative strength and word co-occurrence among concepts are not sufficient to explain illusory memories but is important to take into account also the effects of feature-based semantic relations, and, in particular, the semantic similarity among concepts.

In line with the dimensional theory of emotional space, we developed affective norms for words rated in terms of valence, arousal and dominance in a group of older adults to complete the adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian and to aid research on aging. Here, as in the original Italian ANEW database, participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance by means of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a paper-and-pencil procedure. We observed high split-half reliabilities within the older sample and high correlations with the affective ratings of previous research, especially for valence, suggesting that there is large agreement among older adults within and across-languages. More importantly, we found high correlations between younger and older adults, showing that our data are generalizable across different ages. However, despite this across-ages accord, we obtained age-related differences on three affective dimensions for a great number of words. In particular, older adults rated as more arousing and more unpleasant a number of words that younger adults rated as moderately unpleasant and arousing in our previous affective norms. Moreover, older participants rated negative stimuli as more arousing and positive stimuli as less arousing than younger participants, thus leading to a less-curved distribution of ratings in the valence by arousal space. We also found more extreme ratings for older adults for the relationship between dominance and arousal: older adults gave lower dominance and higher arousal ratings for words rated by younger adults with middle dominance and arousal values. Together, these results suggest that our affective norms are reliable and can be confidently used to select words matched for the affective dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance across younger and older participants for future research in aging.

Remembering object positions across different views is a fundamental competence for acting and moving appropriately in a large-scale space. Behavioural and neurological changes in elderly subjects suggest that the spatial representations of the environment might decline compared to young participants. However, no data are available on the use of different reference frames within topographical space in aging. Here we investigated the use of allocentric and egocentric frames in aging, by asking young and older participants to encode the location of a target in a virtual room relative either to stable features of the room (allocentric environment-based frame), or to an unstable objects set (allocentric objects-based frame), or to the viewer's viewpoint (egocentric frame). After a viewpoint change of 0° (absent), 45° (small) or 135° (large), participants judged whether the target was in the same spatial position as before relative to one of the three frames. Results revealed a different susceptibility to viewpoint changes in older than young participants. Importantly, we detected a worst performance, in terms of reaction times, for older than young participants in the allocentric frames. The deficit was more marked for the environment-based frame, for which a lower sensitivity was revealed as well as a worst performance even when no viewpoint change occurred. Our data provide new evidence of a greater vulnerability of the allocentric, in particular environment-based, spatial coding with aging, in line with the retrogenesis theory according to which cognitive changes in aging reverse the sequence of acquisition in mental development.

Age of acquisition (AoA) is an important psycholinguistic variable that affects the performance of healthy individuals and patients in a large variety of cognitive tasks. For this reason, it becomes more and more compelling to collect new AoA norms for a large set of stimuli in order to allow better control and manipulation of AoA in future research. An important motivation of the present study is to extend previous Italian norms by collecting AoA ratings for a much larger range of Italian words for which concreteness and semantic-affective norms are now available thus ensuring greater coverage of words varying along these dimensions. In the present study, we collected AoA ratings for 1,957 Italian content words (adjectives, nouns, and verbs), by asking healthy adult participants to estimate the age at which they thought they had learned the word in a Web survey procedure. First, we found high split-half correlation within our sample, suggesting strong internal reliability. Second, our data indicate that the ratings collected in this study are as valid and reliable as those collected in previous studies for Italian across different age populations (adult and children) and other languages. Finally, we analyzed the relation between AoA ratings and other lexical-semantic variables (e.g., word frequency, imageability, valence, arousal) and showed that these correlations were generally consistent with the correlations reported in other normative studies for Italian and other languages. Therefore, our new AoA norms are a valuable source of information for future research in the Italian language. The full database is available at the Open Science Framework (osf.io/3trg2).