Abstract
The development of digital technology has provided neurocognitive scientists access to very high quality visual stimuli for use as experimental material. Importantly, stimuli are not solely defined by their figural modalities but by other features too (e.g. by how easily they can be named and manipulated or how familiar they are). In research, these features need to be controlled for otherwise they can act as confounding variables that could interfere with performance, for example, making the results more difficult to interpret. However, control of these confounding variables is possible with sets of stimuli that have been normalized. Several normative datasets exist for line-drawings and, only more recently, for photos. The present work proposes the Bank Of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS), a set of 1,460 high quality photos of common objects among which 480 were normalized for name, category, familiarity, visual complexity, object agreement, viewpoint agreement, and manipulability. Of these objects, 209 have more than one exemplar and 386 have been photographed under different viewpoints. Stimuli are also available in greyscale, blurred, scrambled, and line-drawn version. The BOSS proposes ecological stimuli and new norms and was created specifically to meet the needs of scientists in cognition, vision and psycholinguistics.
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.