A sharp image or a sharp knife: norms for the modality-exclusivity of 774 concept-property items

Abstract

According to recent embodied cognition theories, mental concepts are represented by modality-specific sensory-motor systems. Much of the evidence for modality-specificity in conceptual processing comes from the property-verification task. When applying this and other tasks, it is important to select items based on their modality-exclusivity. We collected modality ratings for a set of 387 properties, each of which was paired with two different concepts, yielding a total of 774 concept-property items. For each item, participants rated the degree to which the property could be experienced through five perceptual modalities (vision, audition, touch, smell, and taste). Based on these ratings, we computed a measure of modality exclusivity, the degree to which a property is perceived exclusively through one sensory modality. In this paper, we briefly sketch the theoretical background of conceptual knowledge, discuss the use of the property-verification task in cognitive research, provide our norms and statistics, and validate the norms in a memory experiment. We conclude that our norms are important for researchers studying modality-specific effects in conceptual processing.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13428-010-0038-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Dutch modality exclusivity norms: Simulating perceptual modality in space

“…In addition, we replicated a visual dominance effect (Lynott & Connell, 2009van Dantzig et al, 2011;Winter, 2016) with Dutch speakers. However, in comparison with Lynott and Connell (2013) who found gustation was the least dominant sense for English nouns, we found the least dominant sense for this set of Dutch words was olfaction.…”

“…The multimodal composition of word meanings has been supported by modality ratings of concept-property relations, adjectives, nouns, and verbs in English too (Lynott & Connell, 2009van Dantzig, Cowell, Zeelenberg, & Pecher, 2011;Winter, 2016). Native English speakers asked to judge words according to how strongly they experienced a concept in the visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory modality assign high ratings of experience to more than one modality.…”

Words, objects, and locations: Perceptual matching explains spatial interference and facilitation

“…Another possible defence of the competition account is that visual strength ratings are epiphenomenal and do not actually reflect perceptual simulations. This charge is also unlikely to be correct, as perceptual strength ratings do predict actual perceptual judgments (Connell & Lynott, 2010;see also van Dantzig, Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Barsalou, 2008) and related perceptual phenomena such as the modality switch effect (Connell & Lynott, 2011;Lynott & Connell, 2009;van Dantzig et al, 2011). …”

“…Alternatively, several research groups have recently espoused the use of perceptual strength ratings collected separately for each modality (Amsell, Urbach, & Kutas, 2012;Lynott & Connell, 2009van Dantzig, Cowell, Zeelenberg, & Pecher, 2011), and indeed a rapidly growing number of studies have shown that those perceptual strength ratings reliably predict a range of cognitive and linguistic behaviors such as word reading times, lexical decision times, property verification times, concreteness judgment times, and memory accuracy (Amsel et al, 2012;Connell & Lynott, 2010, 2011Louwerse & Connell, 2011;Lynott & Connell, 2009;van Dantzig et al, 2011). In a particularly striking demonstration, Connell and Lynott (2012) showed that when the perceptual strength of each of the five modalities are rated separately, those perceptual strength ratings explain significantly and substantially more variance in Language and Spatial Attention 24 word naming and lexical decision response times and error rates than do either imageability ratings or concreteness ratings, thus dramatically outperforming standard measures that were used in research for the prior 50 years.…”

The Impact of Depression and Apathy on Sensory Language

“…Adjectives are used over verbs or nouns because they appear more frequently, and their context is not necessary. These 774 sensory-based adjectives (van Dantzig et al, 2011) are recorded in two different contexts to assess the dominant visual (V), auditory (A), haptic (H), olfactory (O), or gustatory (G) modality. These sensory words are allocated a modality exclusivity score that reflects the brain's Representational System (Fernandino et al, 2015), and can be used to capture the sensory gating biomarker characteristics of a person.…”