Affordance norms for 2825 concrete nouns

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Objects are often described by physical features or semantic relations.
• Actionable properties, or affordances, represent interactive relations between actors and objects.
• Existing normed datasets do not comprehensively cover object affordances.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a normed dataset for affordances of 2825 concrete nouns.
• To compute affordance strength (AFS), affordance proportion (AFP), and affordance set size (AFSS).
• To investigate the relationship between affordance measures and existing semantic norms.

Main Methods:

• Utilized an open-response format to collect action responses for concrete nouns.
• Calculated AFS, AFP, and AFSS for each noun.
• Compared affordance measures with body-object interaction norms (BOI), cosine similarity, and forward associative strength.

Main Results:

• Generated affordance norms for 2825 concrete nouns.
• Found weak relationships between affordance measures (AFS, AFP, AFSS) and existing semantic norms (BOI, cosine similarity, forward associative strength).
• These findings suggest affordances are a distinct construct separate from semantic similarity and associations.

Conclusions:

• The developed affordance norms provide a valuable resource for researchers.
• Affordances represent a unique aspect of object meaning, distinct from semantic and associative properties.
• Future research can utilize these norms to explore the role of affordances in perception, action, and cognition.