Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS) Phase II: 930 New Normative Photos

Abstract

Researchers have only recently started to take advantage of the developments in technology and communication for sharing data and documents. However, the exchange of experimental material has not taken advantage of this progress yet. In order to facilitate access to experimental material, the Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS) project was created as a free standardized set of visual stimuli accessible to all researchers, through a normative database. The BOSS is currently the largest existing photo bank providing norms for more than 15 dimensions (e.g. familiarity, visual complexity, manipulability, etc.), making the BOSS an extremely useful research tool and a mean to homogenize scientific data worldwide. The first phase of the BOSS was completed in 2010, and contained 538 normative photos. The second phase of the BOSS project presented in this article, builds on the previous phase by adding 930 new normative photo stimuli. New categories of concepts were introduced, including animals, building infrastructures, body parts, and vehicles and the number of photos in other categories was increased. All new photos of the BOSS were normalized relative to their name, familiarity, visual complexity, object agreement, viewpoint agreement, and manipulability. The availability of these norms is a precious asset that should be considered for characterizing the stimuli as a function of the requirements of research and for controlling for potential confounding effects.

When the mind wanders: Distinguishing stimulus-dependent from stimulus-independent thoughts during incidental encoding in young and older adults.

“…A total of 324 pictures were selected from the Bank of Standardized Stimuli (Brodeur, Dionne-Dostie, Montreuil, & Lepage, 2010; Brodeur, Guerard, & Bouras, 2014). The 324 pictures were split into three lists of 108.…”

Electrophysiological difference between the representations of causal judgment and associative judgment in semantic memory

“…For example, the present study evaluated causal relations using word stimuli, future studies might use pictorial stimulus (Denkinger & Koutstaal, 2014) to further investigate this issue. As the representations of event pairs are likely to be more complex than that of individual objects, future study might compare causal relations composed by pictorial event pair with causal relations composed by pictorial object pairs directly (e.g., pictorial stimulus; Brodeur, Guérard, & Bouras, 2014;Denkinger & Koutstaal, 2014;Hommel, 2004;Zacks, 2010). Last but not least, a task cue was present to prompt the participants to make the causal or the noncausal associative judgments between pairs of words, thus this task is understood to be a top-down process.…”

Predictors of photo naming: Dutch norms for 327 photos

“…Photos provide multidimensional features of the objects, such as color, texture, and 3-D features (cf. Brodeur, Dionne-Dostie, Montreuil, & Lepage, 2010;Brodeur, Guérard, & Bouras, 2014). Therefore, the difference in surface detail richness between line drawings and photos may affect object recognition and naming differently.…”