Validation of the C.A.R.E. stimulus set of 640 animal pictures: Name agreement and quality ratings

Abstract

Stimulus sets are valuable tools that can facilitate the work of researchers designing experiments. Images of faces, and line drawings of objects have been developed and validated, however, pictures of animals, that do not contain backgrounds, have not been made available. Here we present image agreement and quality ratings for a set of 640 color images of animals on a transparent background, across 60 different basic categories (e.g. cat, dog, frog, bird), some with few, and others with many exemplars. These images were normed on 302 participants. Image agreement was measured both with respect to the proportion of participants that provided the same name as well as the H-statistic for each image. Image quality was measured both overall, and with respect to the accuracy of participants’ naming of the basic category. Word frequency of each basic and superordinate category based on the English Lexicon Project (Balota, et al., 2007) and the HAL database (Kucera & Francis, 1976) are provided as are Age of Acquisition (Kuperman, Stadthagen-Gonzalez, & Brysbaert, 2012) data.

IMABASE: A new set of 313 colourised line drawings standardised in French for name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, age-of-acquisition, and imageability

“…It is worth noting that we are not the only authors to point to the need to provide researchers with new databases of colourised line drawings or new sets of photographs. Russo et al (2018) have provided a database of 640 colourised images of animals (normed on name agreement, picture name agreement, and AoA) because the number of exemplars per category of animals is generally low in the available databases. As claimed by Duñabeitia et al (2018), there is in fact a limited choice for researchers who want to use (colourised) drawings in their experiments.…”

PicPsy: A new bank of 106 photographs and line drawings with written naming norms for Spanish-speaking children and adults

“…Other photographic datasets with norms for adults are the set published by Viggiano et al [ 43 ], in English and Italian; the Hatfield Image Test [ 46 ], in English; the C.A.R.E. set [ 47 ] in English; the set of Shao & Stiegert [ 48 ] in Dutch; the set of Saryazdi, Bannon, Rodrigues, Klammer, & Chambers [ 49 ], in Turkish. The ecological version of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart [ 3 ] set [ 42 ] is the only one in Spanish, and has recently been published also in Italian [ 50 ].…”

“…Additionally, although the number of online websites that offer free photographs in the public domain have increased (see publicdomainpictures.net for a website of public domain pictures), very few standardized banks are easily accessible with a license description and fewer are in the public domain (e.g. [ 47 , 48 ], for normative picture sets under a CC0 license). If standardized picture banks were published under a public domain license, their use could be extended to assessment and educational intervention materials, given that free and unrestricted use of controlled stimuli would be allowed, even in commercial tests and textbooks.…”

“…Normative studies presenting standardized sets of pictures have been carried out with both the spoken naming task (e.g., [ 3 , 30 , 32 , 43 , 46 ]) and the written naming task (e.g., [ 2 , 27 , 28 , 33 , 44 , 45 , 47 , 49 , 50 ]). Some studies with children have also carried out the picture naming task in a written form [ 9 , 34 ].…”

Examining the influence of picture format on children’s naming responses

“…In addition to drawing format datasets, technological development has facilitated the use of digital photographs as experimental stimuli. Moreover, the standardization of photographic sets for adults has progressively increased in recent years (see, for example, Adlington, Laws & Gale, 2009; Russo et al, 2018; in English; Brodeur et al, 2010; Brodeur, Guérard & Bouras, 2014; in English and French; Saryazdi et al, 2018; in Turkish; Shao & Stiegert, 2016; in Dutch; Moreno-Martínez & Montoro, 2012; in Spanish; Navarrete et al, 2019; in Italian). Thus, the need for more ecological stimuli than those provided by line drawings has begun to be highlighted.…”