A normative study for photographs of celebrities in Spain

Abstract

Research on familiar faces has recurrently been conducted in different domains, such as, psycholinguistics, memory, attention, face processing, aging studies, etc. In general, photographs of celebrities, their proper names, or their occupations have been the materials mainly employed in those types of studies. These stimuli are, however, very constrained by the geographic and sociocultural contexts in which the studies are conducted, and, in spite of their relevance for psychological research, there are no normative studies for celebrities in Spain. With the aim of filling this gap, the photographs and names of the 118 most frequently produced celebrities in Spain were collected. For each celebrity, values for 13 different indices (including psycholinguistic properties, naming times, and emotional indicators) were obtained from a young adult Spanish sample. Regression analyses on the data indicated that the main determinant in naming times and ToTs was the percentage of correct responses. Face agreement was also a significant predictor of ToTs. Results were compared with previous celebrity norms in other languages, and discussed in relation to the current models of face processing. These norms are likely to make a useful contribution to the design of more controlled research and applied tools in Psychology.

Norms for a Pictographic System: The Aragonese Portal of Augmentative/Alternative Communication (ARASAAC) System

“…Similar to the written name agreement task, responses during the RT task were highly variable. We employed the same cut-offs used in Bonin et al (2008) and in Marful et al (2018). Thus, we deleted data from participants with less than 21% of correct responses (a total of 3 participants) and RTs that exceeded 2 SD from each item’s mean.…”

“…The previously selected stimuli presented in the index recollection tasks appeared in a random order for each participant, using procedures like the ones employed in other studies (Bonin et al, 2008; Marful et al, 2018).…”

“…This limitation is important because there is a wide mismatch (64%) between the label assigned in the ARASAAC database and the label that we obtained after the written name agreement phase. Thus, we did not include this recognition phase in the ToT task procedure (see Marful et al, 2018, for a similar procedure), and the raw number of ToTs were included in the analysis. These data, in consequence, must be interpreted with caution (see Gollan and Brown, 2006, for a description of the possible limitations of this approach).…”

Recognition and naming test of the Portuguese population for national and international celebrities

“…To each participant, both Portuguese and International, as well as male and female celebrities, were presented. However, differently from study 1 in which we evaluate celebrity faces' recognition and naming, each participant answered three new measures previously considered in other celebrity faces databases (Bonin et al, 2008 ; Marful et al, 2018 ; Smith-Spark et al, 2006 ). Familiarity, expressing the number of times the participants heard about the celebrity throughout their life, was measured using a Likert scale that ranges from 1 – never to 7 – more than once every day.…”

“…Also, the number of databases with pictures of celebrities is steadily increasing and this emergence has spanned across different countries (France - Bonin et al, 2008 ; Spain - Marful et al, 2018 ; Italy - Bizzozero et al, 2007 ; Rizzo et al, 2002 ; England - Smith-Spark et al, 2006 ). This type of stimuli is essential because it allows us to study familiarity using human faces.…”