Validation of the C.A.R.E. stimulus set of 640 animal pictures: Name agreement and quality ratings

Abstract

Stimulus sets are valuable tools that can facilitate the work of researchers designing experiments. Images of faces, and line drawings of objects have been developed and validated, however, pictures of animals, that do not contain backgrounds, have not been made available. Here we present image agreement and quality ratings for a set of 640 color images of animals on a transparent background, across 60 different basic categories (e.g. cat, dog, frog, bird), some with few, and others with many exemplars. These images were normed on 302 participants. Image agreement was measured both with respect to the proportion of participants that provided the same name as well as the H-statistic for each image. Image quality was measured both overall, and with respect to the accuracy of participants’ naming of the basic category. Word frequency of each basic and superordinate category based on the English Lexicon Project (Balota, et al., 2007) and the HAL database (Kucera & Francis, 1976) are provided as are Age of Acquisition (Kuperman, Stadthagen-Gonzalez, & Brysbaert, 2012) data.