The methodology followed to obtain the normative data is described in a paper accepted for publication in Psychologica Belgica. Part of this work was presented at the annual meeting of the Belgian Psychological Society, May 6th 1994 in Liège. Correspondence concerning this work should be addressed to Dr. Régine Martein or Prof. dr. André Vandierendonck.
The author wishes to thank Prof. Dr. André Vandierendonck for his valuable suggestions and Dr. ir. Jeannick Sercu for the drawing of the pictures.
Régine Martein
This work presents the results of a normative data collection study of 216 pictures which can be used in a wide range of cognitive experiments. Black-and-white line drawings of 216 objects, belonging to 20 large semantic categories, were rated by a sample of 300 first-year psychology students at the University of Ghent. These ratings provided data on several variables of central importance to cognitive processing and memory functioning: name agreement, concept agreement, familiarity, visual complexity and image agreement. The following semantic categories were included in the set:
The normative data for these variables can serve as a basis for choosing a subset of pictures and accompanying names to meet with specific stimulus qualities in an experiment.
The following information is shown in the downloadable tables : the name of the semantic category, the most common name of each picture in English and in Dutch, the frequency of the name in Dutch, the mean H value, the percentages name agreement and concept agreement, the means and standard deviations for familiarity and visual complexity. The last two columns present the means and standard deviations for the image agreement ratings.
A zip-file with all pictures and normtables is available here