Abstract
With the aim of finding quantitative indicators of the survival relevance for a set of concrete concepts, a subjective rating task was administered to a large sample of college students (N = 300). In the rating task, participants used a five-point scale to rate 750 concepts in one of two survival-relevant dimensions, providing their own judgment about the relevance of each concept in a situation in which either avoiding death (AD) or obtaining food (OF) was of importance. The subjective ratings showed high stability and reliability and showed varied patterns of association to potentially relevant concept-defining variables, with correlational analyses showing both commonalities and differences between the two rated dimensions. Regression analyses indicated that, while not likely to modulate word accessibility, survival ratings were related to certain conceptual properties that could be especially sensitive for threat detection. The collected data set provides normative information that can be of use in manipulating and controlling verbal stimuli in future research focusing on adaptive properties of episodic memory and other aspects of the human cognitive system. The complete norms are available for downloading at Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/sf9mb/ ).
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