ArticleBehavior research methods2020
The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms: multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words.
Article in Behavior research methods, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 124 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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124 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
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- Centroid analysis: Inferring concept representations from open-ended word responses.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- The Role of Sensorimotor Strength in Understanding Chinese Concepts.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2026Article
- The Meanings of Synesthetic Metaphors Closely Align With Crossmodal Correspondences.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Linguistic structure from a bottleneck on sequential information processing.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Collection of body-object interaction ratings for 5,637 Japanese words.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- ConversationAlign: Open-source software for analyzing patterns of lexical use and alignment in conversation transcripts.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Moving, Seeing, Hearing, Smelling and Tasting: How Sensory-Motor Experiences Shape Early Cognitive Development.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- How well do large language models mirror human cognition of word concepts?: A comparison of psychological ratings for early-acquired English words.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Specificity effect in concrete/abstract semantic categorization task.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- Grounding verbs in action: The facilitative effect of potential physical interactions with verbs.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Interoceptive grounding of conceptual knowledge: new insight from an interoceptive-exteroceptive categorization task of concepts.Psychological research · 2026Article
64 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Sensorimotor information plays a fundamental role in cognition. However, the existing materials that measure the sensorimotor basis of word meanings and concepts have been restricted in terms of their sample size and breadth of sensorimotor experience. Here we present norms of sensorimotor strength for 39,707 concepts across six perceptual modalities (touch, hearing, smell, taste, vision, and interoception) and five action effectors (mouth/throat, hand/arm, foot/leg, head excluding mouth/throat, and torso), gathered from a total of 3,500 individual participants using Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms are unique and innovative in a number of respects: They represent the largest-ever set of semantic norms for English, at 40,000 words × 11 dimensions (plus several informative cross-dimensional variables), they extend perceptual strength norming to the new modality of interoception, and they include the first norming of action strength across separate bodily effectors. In the first study, we describe the data collection procedures, provide summary descriptives of the dataset, and interpret the relations observed between sensorimotor dimensions. We then report two further studies, in which we (1) extracted an optimal single-variable composite of the 11-dimension sensorimotor profile (Minkowski 3 strength) and (2) demonstrated the utility of both perceptual and action strength in facilitating lexical decision times and accuracy in two separate datasets. These norms provide a valuable resource to researchers in diverse areas, including psycholinguistics, grounded cognition, cognitive semantics, knowledge representation, machine learning, and big-data approaches to the analysis of language and conceptual representations. The data are accessible via the Open Science Framework (http://osf.io/7emr6/) and an interactive web application (https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/psychology/lsnorms/).
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