Matching stimuli across a range of influencing variables is no less important for studies of face recognition than it is for those of word processing. Whereas a number of corpora exist to allow experimenters to select a carefully controlled set of word stimuli, similar databases for famous faces do not exist. This article, therefore, provides researchers in the area of face recognition with a useful resource on which to base their stimulus selection. In the first phase of the investigation, British adults over 40 years of age were requested to generate the names of famous people (or celebrities) that they thought they would recognize and to write these down. The most frequently named celebrities were then rated by adults from the same age population for familiarity, distinctiveness, and age of acquisition. The result is a database of 696 famous people, with an indication of their relative eminence in the public consciousness and rated for these important variables. Phoneme counts are also provided for each famous person, together with family name frequency counts in the general population, where available. Materials and links may be accessed at www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Background: We investigated factors associated with COVID-19 vaccine uptake, future vaccination intentions, and changes in beliefs and attitudes over time. Methods: Prospective cohort study. 1500 participants completed an online survey in January 2021 (T1, start of vaccine rollout in the UK), of whom 1148 (response rate 76.5%) completed another survey in October 2021 (T2, all UK adults offered two vaccine doses). Binary logistic regression analysis was used to investigate factors associated with subsequent vaccine uptake. Content analysis was used to investigate the main reasons behind future vaccine intentions (T2). Changes in beliefs and attitudes were investigated using analysis of variance. Findings: At T2, 90.0% (95% CI 88.2%-91.7%) of participants had received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, 2.2% (95% CI 1.3%-3.0%) had received one dose, and 7.4% (95% CI 5.9%-8.9%) had not been vaccinated. Uptake was associated with higher intention to be vaccinated at T1, greater perceived vaccination social norms, necessity of vaccination, and perceived safety of the vaccine. People who had initiated vaccination reported being likely to complete it, while those who had not yet received a vaccine reported being unlikely to be vaccinated in the future. At T2, participants perceived greater susceptibility to, but lower severity of, COVID-19 (p<0.001), than T1. Perceived safety and adequacy of vaccine information were higher (p<0.001). Interpretation: Targeting modifiable beliefs about the safety and effectiveness of vaccination may increase uptake. Funding: Data collection was funded by a Keele University Faculty of Natural Sciences Research Development award and a King's COVID Appeal Fund award.

This exploratory investigation examined the effects of explicit phonological awareness intervention on each subcomponent of Baddeley's verbal working memory model. Fifty school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and concurrent deficits in word reading were randomly assigned to either an experimental (n=25) or a control group (n = 25).Children in both groups received individual traditional language intervention for four, 1 hour sessions each week for 4 weeks (16 hrs). The experimental group received an additional 20 min of phonological awareness intervention each day (5.3 hrs). Participants in the experimental group significantly outperformed the children in the control group across all verbal working memory measures. The strongest effects were found for the digit recall and word list recall subtests, which were used to assess the verbal short-term memory component of the model (i.e., phonological loop). The next largest effect sizes were reported for the subtests of the verbal working memory functioning (i.e., phonological loop and central executive). The smallest change was found on the recalling sentences subtest, which was chosen to represent the episodic buffer component. These results suggest that school-age children with SLI and concomitant word-reading difficulties in second through third grade who receive explicit phonological awareness intervention can make significant gains on untrained verbal working memory skills in a relatively short period of time which underscores the importance of phonological awareness intervention beyond first grade.

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