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

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).