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Affordance Norms for 2825 Concrete Nouns
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Description: Objects are commonly described based on their relations to other objects (e.g., associations, semantic similarity, etc.) or their physical features (e.g., birds have wings, feathers, etc.). However, objects can also be described in terms of their actionable properties (i.e., affordances), which reflect various interactive relationships existing between actors and objects. While several normed datasets have been developed to categorize various aspects of meaning (e.g., semantic features, cue-target associations, etc.), to date, norms for affordances have not been generated. We address this limitation by developing a set of affordance norms for 2825 concrete nouns. Using an open-response format, we computed affordance strength (AFS; i.e., the probability of an item eliciting a particular action response), affordance percentage (AFP; i.e., the percentage of participants in our sample who provided a specific action response), and affordance set-size (AFSS; i.e., the total number of unique action responses) for each item. Because our stimuli overlapped with Pexman et al.’s (2019) Body-Object Interaction norms, we tested whether AFS, AFP, and AFSS were related to BOI, as objects with more perceived action properties may be viewed as being more interactive. Additionally, we tested the relationship between AFS and AFP and two separate measures of relatedness: Cosine similarity and forward associative strength. All analyses, however, revealed weak relationships between affordance measures and existing norms, suggesting that affordance properties reflect a separate construct