The Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS), a new set of 480 normative photos of objects to be used as visual stimuli in cognitive research

Abstract

There are currently stimuli with published norms available to study several psychological aspects of language and visual cognitions. Norms represent valuable information that can be used as experimental variables or systematically controlled to limit their potential influence on another experimental manipulation. The present work proposes 480 photo stimuli that have been normalized for name, category, familiarity, visual complexity, object agreement, viewpoint agreement, and manipulability. Stimuli are also available in grayscale, blurred, scrambled, and line-drawn version. This set of objects, the Bank Of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS), was created specifically to meet the needs of scientists in cognition, vision and psycholinguistics who work with photo stimuli.

Figure 1. The 5-step procedure of stimulus creation.

Figure 2. Some examples from the stimulus set.

Figure 3. Example of one object presented in four different conditions.

Note that objects are blurred and scrambled at 10 and 8 different levels respectively and the drawing version is currently available for 149 stimuli.

Figure 4. Graphical display of tabular frequencies of norms.

Figure 5. Scatter plots of the correlations.

Correlations are between A) H value and familiarity, B) object and viewpoint agreement, C) object agreement and familiarity, and D) object agreement and H value.