Abstract
Body-object interaction (BOI) assesses the ease with which a human body can physically interact with a word’s referent. Recent research has shown that BOI influences visual word recognition processes in such a way that responses to high-BOI words (e.g., couch) are faster and less error prone than responses to low-BOI words (e.g., cliff ). Importantly, the high-BOI words and the low-BOI words that were used in those studies were matched on imageability. In the present study, we collected BOI ratings for a large set of words. BOI ratings, on a 1–7 scale, were obtained for 1,618 monosyllabic nouns. These ratings allowed us to test the generalizability of BOI effects to a large set of items, and they should be useful to researchers who are interested in manipulating or controlling for the effects of BOI. The body-object interaction ratings for this study may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society’s Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Balota, D. A., Yap, M. J., Cortese, M. J., Hutchison, K. A., Kessler, B., Loftis, B., et al. (2007). The English Lexicon Project. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 445–459.
Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 22, 577–660.
Barsalou, L. W. (2003a). Abstraction in perceptual symbol systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 358, 1177–1187.
Barsalou, L. W. (2003b). Situated simulation in the human conceptual system. Language & Cognitive Processes, 18, 513–562.
Barsalou, L. W., Simmons, W. K., Barbey, A. K., & Wilson, C. D. (2003). Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 84–91.
Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cohen, J., MacWhinney, B., Flatt, M., & Provost, J. (1993). Psy-Scope: An interactive graphic system for designing and controlling experiments in the psychology laboratory using Macintosh computers. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 25, 257–271.
Cortese, M. J., & Fugett, A. (2004). Imageability ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36, 384–387.
Cortese, M. J., Simpson, G. B., & Woolsey, S. (1997). Effects of association and imageability on phonological mapping. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4, 226–231.
Damasio, A. R. (1989). Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: A systems-level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition. Cognition, 33, 25–62.
Edelman, G. M., & Tononi, G. (2000). A universe of consciousness: How matter becomes imagination. New York: Basic Books.
Gibbs, R. W. (2006). Embodiment and cognitive science. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Glenberg, A. M. (1997). What memory is for. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 20, 1–55.
ITP Nelson Canadian dictionary of the English language: An encyclopedic reference (1997). Toronto: ITP Nelson.
Kandel, E. R. (2006). In search of memory: The emergence of a new science of mind. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books.
LeDoux, J. E. (2001). Synaptic self: How our brains become who we are. New York: Viking.
Pecher, D., & Zwaan, R. A. (Eds.) (2005). Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Siakaluk, P. D., Pexman, P. M., Aguilera, L., Owen, W. J., & Sears, C. R. (2008). Evidence for the activation of sensorimotor information during visual word recognition: The body-object interaction effect. Cognition, 106, 433–443.
Siakaluk, P. D., Pexman, P. M., Sears, C. R., Wilson, K., Locheed, K., & Owen, W. J. (2008). The benefits of sensorimotor knowledge: Body-object interaction facilitates semantic processing. Cognitive Science, 32, 591–605.
Strain, E., Patterson, K., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1995). Semantic effects in single-word naming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 21, 1140–1154.
Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 625–636.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This research was supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grants to P.D.S. and P.M.P., and by an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award to S.M.T.
Electronic supplementary material
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Tillotson, S.M., Siakaluk, P.D. & Pexman, P.M. Body—object interaction ratings for 1,618 monosyllabic nouns. Behavior Research Methods 40, 1075–1078 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.40.4.1075
Received:
Accepted:
Issue date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.40.4.1075