Semantic similarity is not emotional: No effect of similarity defined by valence, arousal and dominance on short-term ordered recall

Sonier, René-Pierre, Guitard, Dominic, Melanson, Emma, Jamieson, Randall K. and Saint- Aubin, Jean 2025. Semantic similarity is not emotional: No effect of similarity defined by valence, arousal and dominance on short-term ordered recall. Memory & Cognition 10.3758/s13421-024-01678-6 Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

In short-term ordered recall tasks, phonological similarity impedes item and order recall, while semantic similarity benefits item recall with a weak or null effect on order recall. Ishiguro and Saito (2021) recently suggested that these contradictory findings were due to an inadequate assessment of semantic similarity. They proposed a novel measure of semantic similarity based on the distance between items in a three-dimensional space composed of the semantic dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance. We conducted an experimental examination of their proposal. In four experiments, participants performed an immediate serial recall or an immediate order reconstruction task. Performance of dissimilar lists was contrasted with performance for semantically similar lists defined by valence, arousal, and dominance or by the typical latent semantic analysis. Two sets of words were used to assess the reproducibility of the findings and similar results were observed with both sets. As expected, when similarity was defined with latent semantic analysis, items were better recalled without noticeable impact on their order. However, contrary to Ishiguro and Saito’s predictions, when similarity was defined with valence, arousal and dominance, no effect emerged.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	Springer
ISSN:	0090-502X
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	21 January 2025
Date of Acceptance:	16 December 2024
Last Modified:	07 Feb 2025 09:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/175454

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