Most theoretical approaches in cognitive psychology have paid little attention to action and motor control, which might be contradictory given the interest of these dimensions for the study of behavior. This fact was highlighted by Rosenbaum (Reference Rosenbaum2005), who characterized motor control as the Cinderella of psychology. A notable exception is the embodied cognition (EC) theoretical framework, a perspective which posits that cognition is based on bodily and neural systems of perception, action, and emotion within a physical and social interaction environment (Glenberg, Reference Glenberg2015). According to EC, the motor system and action itself play a crucial role in cognitive processes such as language comprehension and memory.
Glenberg and Robertson (Reference Glenberg and Robertson1999, Reference Glenberg and Robertson2000) argued that action is a fundamental element for meaning construction and for language comprehension, because the construction of the meaning of a sentence depends on the possible actions that an individual can carry out in a given context. According to the simulation theory, which constitutes a central principle in EC, language comprehension implies constructing sensorimotor simulations of the events described in sentences, which involves the activation of the brain’s systems of perception, action, and emotion, the same ones that are activated in a real situation (e.g., Glenberg, Reference Glenberg2011). For example, Glenberg and Kaschak (Reference Glenberg and Kaschak2002) found that comprehending a sentence that implies action away or toward the body interferes with making a semantic judgment that requires responding with an action in the opposite direction (the action-sentence compatibility effect). This finding constitutes important empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis that language comprehension is based on simulation processes, in which the same neural systems involved in real action are activated.
Similarly, some studies have shown that engaging the motor system during encoding leads to better memory when the movement performed is compatible with the content of the material to be recalled (e.g., D’Argembeau, Lepper, & Van der Linden, Reference D’Argembeau, Lepper and Van der Linden2008; Förster & Strack, Reference Förster and Strack1997). As far as memory is concerned, Glenberg (Reference Glenberg1997) proposed that memory evolved at the service of perception and action, and argued that memory is formed by embodied representations, which are based on patterns of action, to facilitate our interaction with the environment. From an empirical perspective, it seems that action itself has a direct influence on memory (for an overview, see Madan & Singhal, Reference Madan and Singhal2012). One of the most remarkable examples is a well-known mnemonic phenomenon, namely, the enactment effect. Initially studied by Engelkamp and Krumnacker (Reference Engelkamp and Krumnacker1980), Saltz and Donnenwerth-Nolan (Reference Saltz and Donnenwerth-Nolan1981), and Cohen (Reference Cohen1981), the enactment effect reflects the fact that memory for action-related phrases is better when the subject physically performs the action, in comparison with nonenacted processing of phrases. In the basic paradigm, the participants in the experimental condition are instructed to perform actions like “cut the paper” (subject-performed tasks; SPTs) and the participants in the control condition only have to read or hear the sentences (verbal tasks; VTs). Then, in a posterior free recall test, those participants who performed the actions generally obtain better memory results than those who only read or heard the sentences stating the same actions. A variation of this paradigm includes an extra experimental condition in which the participants see the experimenter perform the actions (experimenter-performed tasks), instead of performing them by themselves. Experimenter-performed tasks also have a positive impact on recall, although it is usually lower than the effect of SPTs.
Numerous replications and variations of this paradigm have shown the consistency of the enactment effect (sometimes also called SPTs effect) and its importance for the study of memory for actions, and several explanations have been proposed for this phenomenon, as reviewed in Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998). According to Madan and Singhal (Reference Madan and Singhal2012), these explanations are based on two main ideas: (a) SPTs give rise to richer and more elaborative representations compared to VTs; and (b) SPTs physically engage the motor system during the encoding phase to a degree that VTs do not. The latter idea is aligned with positions such as those embraced by Macedonia and Knösche (Reference Macedonia and Knösche2011), who suggest that enactment reinforces the connections to embodied features of the word that are present in its semantic representation, and that, alternatively, enactment can be used as a way of embodying any kind of verbal information (e.g., adding a gesture to an abstract word can enrich its representation by attaching a motor trace to it). Beyond mere encoding effects, recent evidence suggests that enactment can also have positive consequences for retrieval, making enacted memories more resistant to the interfering effects posed by dual tasks at the time of the test (Wammes & Fernandes, Reference Wammes and Fernandes2017).
It is important to note that the enactment effect has proven to be relevant for different applied purposes. For instance, it has been considered as an effective learning strategy for students (see Fiorella & Mayer, Reference Fiorella and Mayer2015), so much so that intervention programs based on the involvement of physical action during reading have been developed to enhance children’s reading comprehension. A notable case is the Moved by Reading program (Glenberg, Reference Glenberg2011; Glenberg, Goldberg, & Zhu, Reference Glenberg, Goldberg and Zhu2011; Glenberg, Gutierrez, Levin, Japuntich, & Kaschak, Reference Glenberg, Gutierrez, Levin, Japuntich and Kaschak2004), which demonstrated that both physical and imagined manipulation of concrete objects leads to better memory and comprehension of text. More recently, Kaschak, Connor, and Dombek (Reference Kaschak, Connor and Dombek2017) have developed a comparable intervention program called Enacted Reading Comprehension, which uses hand and arm gestures to represent abstract concepts in order to improve the comprehension of abstract content texts. In addition, Macedonia and Knösche (Reference Macedonia and Knösche2011) found that gesturing is also useful to enhance word learning in a foreign language. Furthermore, some authors have shown how the enactment effect in a SPTs paradigm can yield benefits for patients with memory-related clinical conditions, such as dementia of the Alzheimer type (e.g., Hutton, Sheppard, Rusted, & Ratner, Reference Hutton, Sheppard, Rusted and Ratner1996) or transient global amnesia (Hainselin et al., Reference Hainselin, Quinette, Juskenaite, Desgranges, Martinaud, de La Sayette and Eustache2014).
Studying enactment effects requires the use of carefully constructed verbal materials, usually sentences describing actions, carefully chosen so that they are adequate for the specific research questions under considerations. This implies, therefore, that a complete description of the properties of the sentences is necessary for researchers to be able to implement particular manipulations and to control other variables with known mnemonic value, such as familiarity or emotionality. Most normative studies of verbal materials provide information for single words or pairs of words (for a review, see Proctor & Vu, Reference Proctor and Vu1999; Vaughan, Reference Vaughan2004). However, the number of normative studies using sentences as stimuli is much lower. Addressing this need, in their seminal study, Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998) obtained ratings for 439 action-related Swedish sentences, providing also their translations into English (e.g., “to bite an apple” and “to fly a kite”), in the dimensions of familiarity, emotionality, motor activity, and memorability. Their set of stimuli included, among others, all the sentences used by Cohen (Reference Cohen1981), which were considered particularly important as they have been used by many experimenters. Likewise, there are also ratings available for this set of 439 sentences in German (Molander, Arar, Mavrinac, & Janig, Reference Molander, Arar, Mavrinac and Janig1999) and Croatian (Arar & Molander, Reference Arar and Molander1996), and a selection of 166 sentences were normed in Portuguese (Freitas & Albuquerque, Reference Freitas and Albuquerque2007). Widely accepted as reference materials, these norms have already been used by several researchers to study enactment effects and memory for action phrases (e.g., Feyereisen, Reference Feyereisen2009; Kubik, Söderlund, Nilsson, & Jönsson, Reference Kubik, Söderlund, Nilsson and Jönsson2014), and also in other lines of research using the enactment effect paradigm to study different topics such as developmental amnesia (Brandt, Gardiner, Vargha-Khadem, Baddeley, & Mishkin, Reference Brandt, Gardiner, Vargha-Khadem, Baddeley and Mishkin2006; Gardiner, Brandt, Vargha-Khadem, Baddeley, & Mishkin, Reference Gardiner, Brandt, Vargha-Khadem, Baddeley and Mishkin2006). However, to our knowledge, there are no similar norms for action sentences in the Spanish language.
For this reason, the purpose of this study was to collect ratings and provide normative data for a broad set of widely used action sentences, making possible the future design of empirical studies with well-controlled action-related materials in Spanish. In addition, the availability of these norms in several languages, including Spanish, will be useful for the development of cross-linguistic research projects. Specifically, this kind of normative studies will make it possible for researchers to analyze action-related cognitive processes from a broader perspective, taking into account possible differences and similarities at linguistic and cultural levels. In this sense, it is expected that embodied cognition theories, which grant a fundamental role to action in explaining cognition, will benefit greatly from the availability of this type of norms.
As an example of a potentially important issue that reflects disparities between languages, it is interesting to note that languages vary in the way they encode motion path. Germanic languages, such as English and Swedish, are satellite-framed languages. This means that motion verbs mostly use particles to reflect the path of motion (e.g., go out) and usually describe manner of motion. In contrast, Romance languages, such as Spanish, are verb framed. That is, in this type of languages, verbs mostly encode motion path within themselves (e.g., salir) and do not include manner of motion information or they express it in an optional alternative way (e.g., salir corriendo; Talmy, Reference Talmy1991). In relation to this, Perry, Perlman, and Lupyan (Reference Perry, Perlman and Lupyan2015) showed that Spanish verbs have a lower degree of iconicity (i.e., resemblance between words’ sound and their meaning) than English verbs. These authors suggest that this is because Spanish verbs, as pertaining to a verb-framed language, tend to describe manner of movement less expressively. This type of specific characteristics of languages may need to be considered when designing experiments in the context of embodied cognition, because they might facilitate or interfere in the formation of sensorimotor simulations of the events described in a given sentence. Thus, cross-linguistic studies can also serve to help describe how the idiosyncratic peculiarities of languages affect cognitive processes such as language processing and memory, as well as shed some light on the intrinsic influence of verbal materials on the effects studied in a variety of psychology experiments.
The four dimensions rated in Molander and Arar’s (Reference Molander and Arar1998) study were familiarity, emotionality, motor activity, and memorability. Familiarity is defined by these authors in terms of the frequency of occurrence, that is, the ratings express how familiar or frequent an action is in anyone’s own experience, and it has been shown to have a considerable influence on memory of SPTs and VTs. For instance, Knopf (Reference Knopf1991) showed that free recall of actions is enhanced when encoding highly familiar items in both SPTs and VTs, and that performance in recognition tasks is better for unfamiliar actions in VTs (see Knopf & Neidhardt, Reference Knopf and Neidhardt1989). Emotionality, in this case, reflects the intensity of the emotion elicited by an action, regardless of the kind of emotion concerned, and must also be taken into account when designing memory experiments, because several studies have demonstrated the relation between emotional arousal and memory enhancement for both positive and negative emotional stimuli, compared to neutral stimuli (for a review, see Hamann, Reference Hamann2001). In addition, research on sentence-comprehension processes has shown that using emotionally loaded phrases can be of great help in identifying basic muscular activity patterns involved in the understanding of emotional messages (Havas, Glenberg, Gutowski, Lucarelli, & Davidson, Reference Havas, Glenberg, Gutowski, Lucarelli and Davidson2010). Motor activity, as its name suggests, is a dimension that represents the amount of motor activity that an action implies, and it seems to be an important variable for studying enactment effects, because the main difference between SPTs and VTs is the action performance itself. Consequently, it is expected that higher degrees of motor activity lead to better performance in recall tests. This is consistent with a study by Cohen and Bryant (Reference Cohen and Bryant1991), who found that longer SPTs were recalled better than shorter ones. The amount of motor activity conveyed by verbal statements has also been shown to be a relevant indicator of the language-processing abilities in patients who experience difficulties when planning and executing movements (Herrera, Rodríguez-Ferreiro, & Cuetos, Reference Herrera, Rodríguez-Ferreiro and Cuetos2012). Finally, memorability is described as the estimated ease with which an action can be remembered over time. More specifically, participants assigned to this dimension had to rate how easily they would remember an action if they were to perform it. It is considered that this variable can provide additional information about the probability of remembering a certain item. Moreover, as suggested by Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998), this variable may be particularly interesting for studying metamemory for actions (Cohen, Reference Cohen1988; see also Carroll, Mazzoni, Andrews, & Pocock, Reference Carroll, Mazzoni, Andrews and Pocock1999).
It is then clear that the aforementioned variables not only modulate cognitive processes such as language comprehension and memory in a general way but also play a specific modulating role in memory for action events. Therefore, to achieve optimal scientific validity, these variables should be taken into consideration when studying the enactment effect in a SPT paradigm, as well as other effects related to action, memory, and cognition. In this sense, the ratings provided in the present study allow for the possibility of controlling and manipulating these variables in experimental procedures.
In addition to the four dimensions studied by Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998), in the present study, we also collected ratings for a new variable, namely, vividness of visual imagery (Marks, Reference Marks1973), which describes the extent to which an action can be imagined creating a vivid and realistic mental image. In 1973, Marks developed the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ),Footnote 1 an instrument to measure individual differences in the vividness of experienced visual imagery, and demonstrated that participants scoring higher in this subjective dimension were more accurate in the recall of pictures than those who scored lower. Moreover, vividness of visual imagery has also been studied as a property of the stimuli. For example, Tulving, McNulty, and Ozier (Reference Tulving, McNulty and Ozier1965) obtained vividness ratings for 82 words using a 7-point scale, defining vividness as “the ease with which you can picture something in your mind” (p. 243). In addition, they used the words as learning materials to conduct an experiment in which they found that words scoring higher in vividness were learned more readily than words with lower vividness scores. Thus, although vividness of mental imagery can vary across subjects, it also varies across stimuli, and it has a potential impact on cognitive processing. For this reason, we considered it to be another important variable that probably needs to be controlled when studying processing and memory for action events, especially in VTs, where participants do not have access to real visual perception of the actions.
The corpus of stimuli in this study includes the 439 phrases of the study by Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998), which were translated into Spanish. As in Molander and Arar’s (Reference Molander and Arar1998) study, the present stimuli set included 10 item pairs in which basic phrases were compared to more complex phrases that included an adverbial extension (e.g., “to turn a key” and “to turn a key hesitantly”). Moreover, and given the growing interest of many researchers in studying how different aspects of cognition such as perception, language, and memory are shaped by our body and its sensorimotor interactions with the world (i.e., EC theory), we decided to include in the study two sets of new sentences that complement our corpus of stimuli, with the aim of facilitating future research on some issues studied by this theoretical approach. One set included 64 sentences describing actions that are usually performed in one of the four most common human body postures: lying, sitting, standing, and walking. Our body posture determines to a large extent the way we interact with our environment and the kind of actions that we can perform. Furthermore, as a number of studies have revealed, body posture also affects different aspects of human cognition. For example, Dijkstra, Kaschak, and Zwaan (Reference Dijkstra, Kaschak and Zwaan2007) found that body posture facilitated the retrieval of autobiographical memories when those memories implied a body position that was congruent with the position adopted by the participants during retrieval, in comparison with an incongruent-posture condition. Other studies have shown how body posture can also affect emotions (Duclos et al., Reference Duclos, Laird, Schneider, Sexter, Stern and Van Lighten1989), task persistence (Riskind & Gotay, Reference Riskind and Gotay1982), self-evaluation (Briñol, Petty, & Wagner, Reference Briñol, Petty and Wagner2009), or quantitative estimates (Eerland, Guadalupe, & Zwaan, Reference Eerland, Guadalupe and Zwaan2011). The other set contained 33 sentences that described specific face or hand movements, not included in the original set provided by Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998). We believe that the availability of ratings in different dimensions for sentences describing actions associated with concrete body postures or describing face or hand movements will allow cognitive researchers to conduct specific experimental manipulations and will therefore contribute to ease future research in these areas.
METHOD
Participants
A total of 389 undergraduate students at the Universities of Salamanca and La Laguna, both in Spain, participated voluntarily in the study, which required rating responses using a computer. The participants signed an informed consent form and received course credit for their participation. All data from 22 participants were discarded due to inadequate performance in the rating task, applying at least one of two criteria: 20 or more trials in a row with the same response, or 30 or more responses made in less than 1 s. Thus, the final sample included 367 participants, 290 female, with a mean age of 20.0 years (SD = 2.7; range = 17–40 years). All participants were native speakers of Spanish.
Stimuli
The 439 sentences of Molander and Arar’s (Reference Molander and Arar1998) study were translated into Spanish by the authors,Footnote 2 who are fluent speakers of English as a second language, with the assistance of a native English speaker who was fluent in Spanish. In addition, 97 new sentences, created by the authors, were included in the study. Of these, 64 describe actions that are usually performed in specific body postures, namely, lying (e.g., “to lie on the grass”), sitting (“to play chess”), standing (“to fry an egg”), or walking (“to wander around the garden”); 17 described face movements (“to raise the eyebrows” or “to make a sad face”); and 16 described hand movements (“to rub hands” or “to make a fist”).
Procedure
All data were collected using Online Ratings of Visual Stimuli open-source software (OR-Vis; Hirschfeld, Bien, de Vries, Lüttmann, & Schwall, Reference Hirschfeld, Bien, de Vries, Lüttmann and Schwall2010). Five separate tasks were created, corresponding to each of the five different dimensions included in the study, and each participant was randomly assigned to one of the tasks, with the only restriction of maintaining a similar proportion of male and female participants across tasks. A 7-point scale, where 1 corresponded to the lowest value and 7 corresponded to the highest value, was used to rate the dimensions. Each participant rated 268 sentences, half of the total, which were randomly selected in each case.Footnote 3 Each target sentence was rated by an average of 32 participants, with a minimum of 27 valid observations for each sentence.
The data collection was done in group sessions of 10 to 25 participants at a time, using individual computers. The participants were required to provide demographic information, to read carefully the instructions of the task on the computer screen, and to perform four practice examples. The instructions for the familiarity, emotionality, motor activity, and memorability rating tasks were obtained from Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998) and translated into Spanish. Minor changes were introduced in these instructions to adapt them to the computer-based rating tool. The exact and complete instructions in Spanish used in the present study are available in the online-only Supplementary Materials (Rating_instructions.pdf).
In the case of familiarity, the English translation of the specific Spanish instructions was as follows: “One of the dimensions along which actions can vary is familiarity. Some actions are very frequent, and a majority of people have experienced them many times; others are hardly experienced by anyone. This task contains phrases related to actions. Your task is to rate the frequency of each of the actions described by the phrases, that is, to rate how familiar or how frequent each action is according to your own experience. Your ratings should express how often you have performed, observed, or thought about each action.”
The English translation of the Spanish instructions for the emotionality dimension was as follows: “One of the dimensions along which actions can vary is emotionality. Some actions may arouse strong positive or negative feelings in you, whereas other actions give rise to weak feelings or no feelings at all. This task contains phrases related to actions. Your task is to rate the emotionality of each of the actions described by the phrases, that is, to rate the degree to which an action arouses feelings. Thus, it is the intensity of the emotion that is relevant, not the kind of emotion.”
The English translation of the Spanish instructions for the motor activity dimension was as follows: “One of the dimensions along which action can vary is in amount of motor activity. Performing some actions involves a large amount of motor activity, whereas performing other actions involves very little motor activity. This task contains phrases related to actions. Your task is to rate the amount of motor activity of each action described by the phrases, that is, how much you have to move an object or your body in order to carry out the action.”
For the memorability dimension, the English translation of the specific Spanish instructions was as follows: “One of the dimensions along which action can vary is in memorability. Some actions may be very easy to remember and recall after a while; others may be very hard to remember and recall. This task contains phrases related to actions. Your task is to rate the memorability of each action described by the phrases, that is, to rate how easily you would remember an action if you were to perform it.”
The instructions for the vividness of visual imagery rating task, newly used in this study, were adapted from the Spanish adaptation of the revised version of the VVIQ (VVIQ-2; Beato, Díez, Pinho, & Rodrigues Simões, Reference Beato, Díez, Pinho and Rodrigues Simões2006), and the English translation of the specific Spanish instructions was as follows: “One of the dimensions along which actions can vary is the vividness of the visual imagery that we form in our mind when we think about those actions. Some actions generate very vivid visual images in our mind, whereas others generate images with little vividness. This task contains a number of action phrases. Your task is to rate the vividness of each of the images of actions denoted by the phrases, that is, to rate how vivid the visual image formed in your mind is for each action.”
Common to all tasks were instructions on how to do the ratings using a 7-point scale, some examples of concrete actions for which extreme scores could be expected on each scale (except for memorability and vividness tasks, where no examples were provided), and a short practice exercise in which participants were asked to actually apply the scale to rate 4 sentences used as examples. After reading the instructions and practicing with the examples, the participants started the rating task, in which the 268 sentences were presented in a random order on the computer screen. In each trial, a target sentence was presented in the center of the computer screen and a 7-point rating scale was displayed below. Two labels were shown at the extremes of the scale to remind the participants of the scale values. The responses were entered by selecting a single number on the scale, via mouse click. The participants were asked to work at their own pace, responding quickly but as accurately as possible. The total duration of the task was between 30 and 45 min.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The complete set of ratings for the 536 action-related sentences is available in the online-only Supplementary Materials (SpanishActionSentences.xlsx). The file includes a column listing the 536 Spanish sentences, with a twin column listing their English translation. In adjacent columns, for each sentence, the mean rating (e.g., familiarity_m) and the corresponding standard deviation (e.g., familiarity_sd) for each dimension are provided. The first 439 sentences correspond to those from Molander and Arar’s (Reference Molander and Arar1998) study, and they have been listed with the same ID number to allow comparisons. Sentences numbered from 440 to 503 correspond to actions usually performed in different body postures: lying (440–455), sitting (456–471), standing (472–487), and walking (488–503). Finally, the last 33 sentences correspond to face movements (504–520) and hand movements (521–536).
As is shown in Figure 1, the distributions were quite similar to those reported by Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998) for the dimensions shared with that seminal study. Familiarity, emotionality, motor activity, and memorability were positively skewed, and ratings were fairly well distributed along the 7-point scales (see also Table 1), except for the memorability dimension, in which the average scores were concentrated in the center of the distribution, showing a smaller rating range and hardly any extreme scores (see Table 2 for translated examples of sentences at both extremes of each rating scale). Vividness ratings also represented values along the complete range of the scale, with a negatively skewed distribution. Overall, small differences were found between the mean scores of men and women (see Table 1), and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests showed that the differences between men and women on average mean ratings were significant for the dimensions of familiarity (Z = –5.386, p<.001, d = –0.01, 95% confidence interval; CI [–0.21, 0.02]), emotionality (Z = –2.197, p = .028, d = –0.07, 95% CI [–0.19, 0.05]), memorability (Z = –3.931, p<.001, d = 0.18, 95% CI [0.06, 0.30]), and vividness (Z = –5.211, p<.001, d = –0.14, 95% CI [–0.26, –0.02]), suggesting that men and women tend to rate these dimensions differently, although to a moderate extent, as denoted by the negligible effect sizes.Footnote 4
Figure 1. Distributions of the mean ratings for each dimension.
Table 1. Mean, standard deviation, and range of ratings for each dimension
Table 2. Examples of the stimuli at both extremes of the rating scale in each dimension
To assess the reliability of the norms, for each dimension, participant scores were randomly divided into two subgroups, with the only restriction that the two groups were comparable in terms of mean age and in their distribution of men and women. In each dimension, Spearman’s correlations were calculated between the mean ratings of the items in both subgroups. The correlations were high and significant for familiarity (r s = .96), emotionality (r s = .85), motor activity (r s = .90), and vividness (r s = .85), all ps < .001, indicating very good reliability. In contrast, a moderate correlation was found for memorability (r s = .48, p<.001). For completeness, intraclass correlation indexes were calculated for each rated dimension (two-way random-effects model, absolute agreement). Intraclass correlation values were high for familiarity, emotionality, motor activity, and vividness (.98, .95, .96, and .93, respectively), and moderate for memorability (.62). These results are similar to those obtained by Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998) and seem to indicate that the memorability dimension might be more difficult to rate or less precisely defined than the rest of the dimensions.
As explained above, the present stimuli set contains 10 items, which, in addition to its basic format, were also included with adverbial extensions (e.g., “to turn a key” and “to turn a key hesitantly”). Means and standard deviations for this subset of sentences in both formats are presented in Table 3. The Pearson correlations between the basic format and the adverbially extended sentences were high and significant for familiarity (r = .86, p = .001), emotionality (r = .92, p<.001), and motor activity (r = .88, p = .001), and moderate and not significant for memorability (r = .51, p = .13) and vividness (r = .57, p = .09). These results might suggest that adding an adverbial extension to a sentence does not alter significantly the relative difference between items in familiarity, emotionality, and motor activity, although the reduced sample of comparisons do not allow firm conclusions. We conducted additional paired-samples t tests to compare the average ratings between the 10 sentences with and without adverbial extensions. The differences were significant for familiarity, t (9) = 3.926, p = .003, d = 0.90, 95% CI [–0.08, 1.89], and vividness, t (9) = 4.171, p = .002, d = 1.23, 95% CI [0.21, 2.26], and not significant for emotionality, t (9) = –1.429, p = .187, d = –0.21, 95% CI [–1.16, 0.73], motor activity, t (9) = –1.216, p = .255, d = –0.19, 95% CI [–1.13, 0.75], or memorability, t (9) = 0.549, p = .596, d = –0.18, 95% CI [–0.76, 1.12]. As in Molander and Arar’s (Reference Molander and Arar1998) study, the differences observed in the familiarity dimension revealed that the sentences with an adverbial extension led to lower ratings (M = 3.50) than the sentences in the basic format (M = 3.91). This result is consistent with a study by Nilsson, Nyberg, Nouri, and Rönnlund (Reference Nilsson, Nyberg, Nouri and Rönnlund1995), who reported that enriched action sentences (e.g., “wave your hands as a conductor”) tended to be rated as less familiar than the same sentences presented in a basic format (e.g., “wave your hands”). Similarly, the sentences with an adverbial extension gave rise to lower ratings (M = 4.39) than the basic sentences (M = 5.37) in the vividness dimension, which suggests that constructing a vivid mental image of an action is more difficult when the action is more sophisticated or more specific, and probably less familiar. In this sense, it must be kept in mind that the correlation between familiarity and vividness dimensions was very high in our study (r s = .92, p<.01), as explained below.
Table 3. Means and standard deviations for the 10 sentences presented with and without adverbial extensions
An estimation of validity was obtained by running Spearman’s correlations between each dimension in the present set of Spanish sentences and the corresponding scores in the 439 sentences shared with Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998). All correlations were positive and significant (all ps < .01). The correlations were high for familiarity (r s = .86), emotionality (r s = .78), and motor activity (r s = .83), and moderate for memorability (r s = .42). A possible explanation for this lower correlation is that the memorability dimension, as suggested above, might be less precisely defined and consequently might be more difficult to rate than the rest of the dimensions, partly because the rating instructions for this dimension did not include concrete examples, in contrast to familiarity, emotionality, and motor activity dimensions, and also because the estimation of the memorability of actions might be an inherently difficult task compared to the rating of the other dimensions. As a result, the memorability dimension might have led to a possible central tendency bias, with average scores concentrated in the center of the distribution (see Figure 1).
The complete set of intercorrelations among the five rated dimensions is presented in Table 4. The most notable result was a high correlation between familiarity and vividness (r s = .92, p<.01), suggesting that highly familiar or frequent actions tend to elicit a more vivid mental image. Although this correlation was very high, it can be argued that these dimensions are relatively independent, as they differ in their overall mean ratings (see Table 1) and in their distributions of the mean ratings (see Figure 1). Vividness ratings tended to be higher than familiarity ratings, and the distribution of the mean ratings of the vividness dimension was negatively skewed, in contrast with the distribution of the familiarity dimension, which was positively skewed. In addition, these two dimensions correlated differently with the rest of the dimensions. For example, emotionality correlated significantly with vividness (r s = .13, p<.01) but not with familiarity (r s = –.001, p = .99), and memorability correlated negatively with familiarity (r s = –.07, p = .11) but positively with vividness (r s = .07, p = .10). Motor activity correlated negatively with both familiarity (r s = –.40, p<.01) and vividness (r s = –.36, p<.01), suggesting that the actions that imply a greater amount of motor activity (e.g., “to build a partition”) tend to be less familiar or frequent and give rise to a less vivid mental image than those actions that imply less motor activity (e.g., “to sleep in a bed”), at least for a university student population. It must be kept in mind that a number of actions included in our stimuli set are bizarre or extremely unlikely. For example, the sentence “to hug a cactus” would imply a substantial amount of motor activity, but it is obviously very unfamiliar.
Table 4. Intercorrelations (Spearman) among dimensions for all the 536 items
Note:
* p<.05.
** p<.01.
Another high correlation was observed between emotionality and memorability (r s = .53, p<.01). In this study, emotionality reflects the intensity of the emotion elicited by an action, and not the kind of emotion concerned. Therefore, this correlation suggests that those actions that elicit more intense emotions are perceived as easier to remember over time than less emotional actions. This is consistent with a study by Kousta, Vinson, and Vigliocco (Reference Kousta, Vinson and Vigliocco2009), which showed that emotionally significant verbal stimuli have a processing advantage over neutral words, and with several studies that have demonstrated a memory enhancement for both positive and negative emotional stimuli (for a review, see Hamann, Reference Hamann2001).
The intercorrelations observed in the present study were similar to those reported by Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998), with the exception that these authors found a significant correlation between familiarity and emotionality (r = –.28, p<.01) when that correlation was not significant in our study (r s = –.001, p = .99). However, it should be taken into account that discrepant results can be found among other studies when the correlation between familiarity and emotionality (or arousal) of words is examined, as positive correlations (Campos, Marcos, & González, Reference Campos, Marcos and González2002; Campos, Pérez-Fabello, & González, Reference Campos, Pérez-Fabello and González2001), negative correlations (Paivio, Reference Paivio1968), and correlations close to zero (Rubin, Reference Rubin1980; Stadthagen-González, Imbault, Pérez Sánchez, & Brysbaert, Reference Stadthagen-González, Imbault, Pérez Sánchez and Brysbaert2017; Warriner, Kuperman, & Brysbaert, Reference Warriner, Kuperman and Brysbaert2013) have been reported. Thus, further research is needed to clarify the relationship between these two variables.
It could be added that memorability correlated highly with familiarity (r = –.66, p<.01) and motor activity (r = .52, p<.01) in Molander and Arar’s (Reference Molander and Arar1998) study, but those correlations were lower, although in the same direction, in the present study (see Table 4). These differences might come from the fact that we added 97 new sentences to the stimuli set used by Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998). However, as shown in Table 5, the intercorrelations among the five dimensions are roughly the same when the new sentences are taken out. Thus, the discrepancies between the correlations reported by Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998) and ours could be attributed to difficulties in rating the memorability dimension, as explained above, or to cultural and/or linguistic differences affecting the ratings of some of the sentences in one or more dimensions.
Table 5. Intercorrelations (Spearman) among dimensions for the 439 items shared with Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998)
Note:
* p<.05.
** p<.01.
CONCLUSION
The present study provides familiarity, emotionality, motor activity, memorability, and vividness of visual imagery ratings in a set of 536 action sentences in Spanish, which constitutes, to date, the only normative study available for action-related sentences in Spanish including those dimensions. Analyses revealed a strong resemblance to the results obtained by Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998) for the shared sentences, and good reliability and validity scores, except for the memorability dimension, whose moderate indexes may be attributed to inherent difficulties in the rating task compared to rating the other dimensions. The availability of the present norms is expected to allow researchers and experts interested in both theoretical and applied purposes to design studies that rely on the use of well-controlled materials in Spanish-speaking samples of participants. Of importance as well, the widely used corpus of materials provided by Molander and Arar (Reference Molander and Arar1998) is supplemented here by the inclusion of 97 new sentences describing actions usually performed using different body postures and face or hand movements, which may be useful for designing specific experiments aimed at studying how cognition is shaped by our body and its sensorimotor interactions with the world.
We consider that these norms constitute useful material for further studying influences of action and action processing on cognition, and especially for the study of memory for action events and enactment effects in memory. In this regard, there are promising areas of development focusing on issues such as the modulation of enactment effects by motor expertise (Peng, Li, & Zhu, Reference Peng, Li and Zhu2018) and the role of enactment on the creation of false memories (Lindner, Schain, & Echterhoff, Reference Lindner, Schain and Echterhoff2016) or memory for actions across the life span (Badinlou, Kormi-Nouri, Nasab, & Knopf, Reference Badinlou, Kormi-Nouri, Nasab and Knopf2017; Silva, Pinho, Souchay, & Moulin, Reference Silva, Pinho, Souchay and Moulin2015).
Moreover, the present norms could have potential implications in the context of applied cognition initiatives, such as the development of reading comprehension programs (Glenberg, Reference Glenberg2011; Glenberg et al., Reference Glenberg, Gutierrez, Levin, Japuntich and Kaschak2004, Reference Glenberg, Goldberg and Zhu2011; Kaschak et al., Reference Kaschak, Connor and Dombek2017; Walker, Wong, Fialko, Restrepo, & Glenberg, Reference Walker, Wong, Fialko, Restrepo and Glenberg2017), the acquisition of a second language (Macedonia & Mueller, Reference Macedonia and Mueller2016; Toumpaniari, Loyens, Mavilidi, & Paas, Reference Toumpaniari, Loyens, Mavilidi and Paas2015), the attenuation of cognitive decline in older people (Banducci et al., Reference Banducci, Daugherty, Biggan, Cooke, Voss, Noice and Kramer2017), and the diagnosis and rehabilitation of patients with motor-related neuropsychological conditions (Cotelli, Manenti, Brambilla, & Borroni, Reference Cotelli, Manenti, Brambilla and Borroni2017; Herrera et al., Reference Herrera, Rodríguez-Ferreiro and Cuetos2012).
Finally, these norms will not only allow more researchers to work on issues of interest with Spanish-speaking samples of participants but also be useful to conduct new cross-linguistic research, as similar norms are already available in Swedish (Molander & Arar, Reference Molander and Arar1998), German (Molander et al., Reference Molander, Arar, Mavrinac and Janig1999), Croatian (Arar & Molander, Reference Arar and Molander1996), and Portuguese (Freitas & Albuquerque, Reference Freitas and Albuquerque2007), and the field is ready for advancement taking into account potential modulation of action-related processes by aspects of language or cultural specificity. As an example, the familiarity of actions has proven to be different in German and Chinese groups of participants (Umla-Runge, Zimmer, Fu, & Wang, Reference Umla-Runge, Zimmer, Fu and Wang2012). In addition, recent research has begun to more generally demonstrate the importance and usefulness of adopting a cross-linguistic perspective in linguistic, neuroscience, and cognitive research (e.g., Katsos et al., Reference Katsos, Cummins, Ezeizabarrena, Gavarró, Kuvač Kraljević, Hrzica and Noveck2016; Łuniewska et al., Reference Łuniewska, Haman, Armon-Lotem, Etenkowski, Southwood, Anđelković and Ünal-Logacev2016; Perry et al., Reference Perry, Perlman and Lupyan2015; Rueckl et al., Reference Rueckl, Paz-Alonso, Molfese, Kuo, Bick, Frost and Frost2015), as it allows the establishment of comparisons of similarity and disparity between languages. The availability of a wide corpus of ratings for verbal stimuli in different languages may be a particularly valuable resource to this end.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors were supported by Research Grants PSI2013-42872-P and PSI2017-82748-P awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Additional support came from Predoctoral Grant 463 A.B.01, 2013 from the University of Salamanca and Banco Santander (to A.M.D.-Á.), from Research Grant SA052G18 from Junta de Castilla y León (to A.F.), and from Research Grant 2017/0001035 from the University of La Laguna (to M.A.A.). We are very grateful to two anonymous reviewers and the Associate Editor for their helpful suggestions and comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. The raw data from this study are available at the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/vpjgr/).
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
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