A normative study for photographs of celebrities in Spain

Abstract

[EN]Research on familiar faces has recurrently been conducted in different domains, such as, psycholinguistics, memory, attention, face processing, aging studies, etc. In general, photo graphs 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 fre quently produced celebrities in Spain were collected. For each celebrity, values for 13 differ ent indices (including psycholinguistic properties, naming times, and emotional indicators) were obtained from a young adult Spanish sample. Regression analyses on the data indi cated 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 com pared with previous celebrity norms in other languages, and discussed in relation to the cur rent 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.