Dissociation between thematic and functional similarity relations between objects: Property generation data from 100 manipulable artifact concepts

The property generation task is commonly used to study the organization of semantic information in memory. However, while recent data show temporal differences in the activation of thematic and functional properties during manipulable artifact identification, the role of the two property types in the definition of conceptual relations between objects has not been distinguished. The aim of this study was to test, using a property generation task, whether there was a dissociation between thematic relations between objects (e.g., a saw is used with/on wood; a fishing rod is used with/attached to a hook) and functional similarity relations between objects (e.g., a saw, like a knife, can be used for cutting; a fishing rod, like a net, can be used for fishing). One hundred concepts of manipulable artifacts were proposed to 266 participants who each had to generate five properties in response to each concept. The data highlight an important dissociation between thematic and functional similarity relations, therefore supporting the hypothesis that two distinct mechanisms are involved in the organization of semantic knowledge of objects. The data collected also represent an important database of concepts and properties that will be useful for future studies on object conceptual processing ( https://sites.google.com/site/solenekalenine/home/resources).