Memory effects of semantic attributes: A method of controlling attribute contamination

Brainerd, Charles J.; Bialer, D. M.; Chang, Meng‐Chou

doi:10.3758/s13428-022-01945-x

Cited by 4 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…The current situation with respect to the attribute contamination problem is this. On the one hand, normed materials are now available that can be used to cleanly manipulate the latent semantic attributes in Figure 1, in the form of factor scores for those attributes (Brainerd et al, 2022). By manipulating words' scores on any one of these latent attributes, its downstream effects can be assessed without being contaminated by the other two latent attributes because factor scores for different attributes are uncorrelated.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Each of the six attributes is substantially correlated with the other five and fails discriminant validity tests for at least one of them, with four of the attributes (categorization, concreteness, imagery, and meaningfulness) failing discriminant validity tests for two of them. In addition, Brainerd et al (2022) found that concreteness failed discriminant validity tests for body-object interaction.…”

Section: Concretenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Beyond the emotion literature, Brainerd et al (2022) recently discussed the attribute contamination problem for the full set of attributes in Table 1. They concluded that inter-attribute correlations in rating norms are too extensive to be controlled with the usual methods of multivariate regression or equating levels of a target attribute for the levels of all attributes with which it is correlated.…”

Section: Concretenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The latent attributes are (a) emotional valence, with nine other attributes falling along it; (b) age-of-acquisition, with six other attributes falling along it; and (c) symbolic size, with four other attributes falling along it. Brainerd et al (2022) observed that a conceptual strength of this space is that each of its generating attributes maps with a real-world variable that is a familiar component of everyday experience. Those variables are personal feelings, simple repetition, and physical magnitude for emotional valence, age-of-acquisition, and size, respectively.…”

Section: The Big Threementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The positions of the individual attributes along each latent attribute are determined by how strongly they loaded on that attribute in the principal component analysis (e.g., on the valence latent attribute, the loading of pleasantness was strongest and the loading of gender was weakest). See Brainerd et al (2022) for full quantitative information on attributes’ factor loadings and amounts of variance accounted for.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The big three: Accuracy, organization, and retrieval effects of latent semantic attributes.

Brainerd¹,

Liu²,

Bialer³

et al. 2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Rating norms for semantic attributes (e.g., concreteness, dominance, familiarity, and valence) are widely used in many psychological literatures to study the effects of processing specific types of semantic content. Word and picture norms for many attributes are available for thousands of items, but there is a contamination problem in experimentation. When an attribute's ratings are varied, how the semantic content that people process changes is unclear because ratings of individual attributes are correlated with ratings of so many other attributes. To solve this problem, the psychological space that 20 attributes occupy has been mapped, and factor score norms have been published for the latent attributes that generate that space (emotional valence, age-of-acquisition, and symbolic size). These latent attributes have yet to be manipulated in experimentation, and hence, their effects are unknown. We conducted a series of experiments that focused on whether they affect accuracy, memory organization, and specific retrieval processes. We found that (a) all three latent attributes affected recall accuracy, (b) all three affected memory organization in recall protocols, and (c) all three affected direct verbatim access, rather than reconstruction or familiarity. The memory effects of two of them (valence and age-of-acquisition) were unconditional, but memory effects were only detected for the third at particular levels of the other two. The key implications are that semantic attributes can now be cleanly manipulated, and when they are, they have broad downstream effects on memory. Public Significance StatementA fundamental principle of human memory is that meaning is crucial: Information that is more meaningful to people is more easily learned, more easily remembered, and more easily retained over time. Meaning has many components, and hence, we must understand the effects of specific components to use this principle to optimize memory. That question has traditionally been investigated by studying the effects of distinct semantic attributes, such as categorization, concreteness, imagery, familiarity, and valence. However, we know that these attributes are not actually distinct and, instead, are substantially correlated. This problem has recently been solved by analyzing a large collection of semantic attributes and extracting three latent attributes (emotional valence, age-of-acquisition, and symbolic size) that are actually distinct from each other. Our experiments show that people process each of these latent attributes because each has broad memory effects. In particular, each latent attribute affects recall accuracy, the organization of memory, and people's ability to recover literal verbatim memories of experience.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Concretenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Concretenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Big Threementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The big three: Accuracy, organization, and retrieval effects of latent semantic attributes.

Brainerd¹,

Liu²,

Bialer³

et al. 2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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More is not necessarily better: How different aspects of sensorimotor experience affect recognition memory for words.

Dymarska

Connell

Banks

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Semantic richness theory predicts that words with richer, more distinctive semantic representations should facilitate performance in a word recognition memory task. We investigated the contribution of multiple aspects of sensorimotor experience—those relating to the body, communication, food, and objects—to word recognition memory, by analyzing megastudy data in a series of hierarchical linear regressions. We found that different forms of sensorimotor experience produced different effects on memory. While stronger grounding in object- and food-related experience facilitated word memory performance as expected for semantic richness, experience relating to communication did not. Critically, sensorimotor experience relating to the body impaired rather than facilitated recognition memory by inflating false alarms, which was not consistent with the idea that semantically richer representations are more memorable. Additionally, we found that pure imageability (i.e., consciously generating mental imagery, distinct from sensorimotor experience) contributes to semantic richness effects on word memory but with much smaller effect sizes than previously reported, once sensorimotor grounding was taken into account. These results suggest that word recognition memory is often but not consistently facilitated by rich semantic representations and that it is essential to separately consider distinct forms of sensorimotor experience rather than assuming more information is always better. The findings have implications for the use of semantic variables in memory research.

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Forgetting of specific and gist visual associative episodic memory representations across time

Greene

Naveh–Benjamin

2023

Psychon Bull Rev

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Memory effects of semantic attributes: A method of controlling attribute contamination

Cited by 4 publications

References 58 publications

The big three: Accuracy, organization, and retrieval effects of latent semantic attributes.

The big three: Accuracy, organization, and retrieval effects of latent semantic attributes.

More is not necessarily better: How different aspects of sensorimotor experience affect recognition memory for words.

Forgetting of specific and gist visual associative episodic memory representations across time

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