In this article we present a standardized set of 260 pictures for use in experiments investigating differences and similarities in the processing of pictures and words. The pictures are black-and-white line drawings executed according to a set of rules that provide consistency of pictorial representation. The pictures have been standardized on four variables of central relevance to memory and cognitive processing: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity , and visual complexity. The intercorrelations among the four measures were low, suggesting that the)' are indices of different attributes of the pictures. The concepts were selected to provide exemplars from several widely studied semantic categories. Sources of naming variance, and mean familiarity and complexity of the exemplars, differed significantly across the set of categories investigated. The potential significance of each of the normative variables to a number of semantic and episodic memory tasks is discussed. Investigators studying aspects of verbal processes have long had access to extensive normative data on various objective and subjective dimensions of their verbal materials. Brown (1976) recently compiled a catalog of scaled verbal materials that included 172 studies providing such information. For the set of verbal materials most comparable to the present set of pictures-English nouns-such dimensions include objective measures of frequency of occurrence and subjective measures of familiarity, age of acquisition, concreteness, imagery, meaningfulness, and emotionality. In contrast, normative data on characteristics of pictorial representations of concrete

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