Stimulus generation, ratings, phoneme counts, and group classifications for 696 famous people by British adults over 40 years of age

Abstract

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.

A normative study for photographs of celebrities in Spain

“…However, different from pictures of objects, the collection of normative data for depictions of familiar people has been much scarcer. Thus far, only four studies have collected normative data for celebrities: Bonin, Perret, Méot, Ferrand, and Mermillod [ 16 ] in French; Rizzo, Venneri, and Papagno [ 17 ] and Bizzozero, Lucchelli, Saetti, and Spinnler [ 18 ] in Italian; and Smith-Spark, Moore, Valentine, and Sherman [ 19 ] in English. Still, and in spite of the small number of studies, norms for celebrity faces can be of great help when attempting to address some very relevant cognitive and linguistic issues, such as the generalization of speech production models.…”

“…It should be noted that celebrity norms are highly constrained by geographic context and cultural peculiarities. Thus, although we can certainly find certain famous people that are universally known, there are also many celebrities who are only famous in particular contexts (e.g., only 2% of the celebrities that comprised the British norms of Smith- Spark et al [ 19 ] appeared in the French norms of Bonin et al [ 16 ]). Therefore, collecting celebrity norms for a given country or cultural niche seems to be the appropriate course of action.…”

“…Previous celebrity norms have been centered on the study of variables traditionally relevant in object naming [ 16 , 19 ] (notice that the studies developed by Rizzo et al [ 17 ] and Bizzozero et al [ 18 ] had mainly clinical purposes, and a dimensions of a different kind were normed, e.g., famous person recognition, semantic knowledge about the famous person). For example, Smith-Spark et al [ 19 ] collected ratings of familiarity, distinctiveness, age of acquisition (AoA), objective surname frequency, and number of phonemes for a set of 696 celebrities with a sample of British participants over 40 years old.…”

The representation and processing of familiar faces in dyslexia: differences in age of acquisition effects

“…Participants rated the stimuli on 7-point scales, according to previously defined rules (Moore & Valentine, 1998;Smith-Spark, Moore, Valentine, & Sherman, 2006). It was emphasized that it was the participant's personal opinion that was important and that there were no right or wrong answers.…”

Psycholinguistic norms and face naming times for photographs of celebrities in French

“…To our knowledge, the only study that has collected norms for this kind of stimuli is the one conducted by Smith-Spark et al (2006). We shall return to it later in this article.…”