Visual and semantic similarity norms for a photographic image stimulus set containing recognizable objects, animals and scenes

• Published in: Behavior research methods Vol. 54; no. 5; pp. 2364 - 2380
• Main Authors: Jiang, Zhuohan, Sanders, D. Merika W., Cowell, Rosemary A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.10.2022; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Behavioral Science and Psychology; Cognitive Psychology; Multidimensional scaling; Psychology; Semantics; Database; Semantic similarity; Multidimensional scaling; Stimulus norms; Visual similarity
• ISSN: 1554-3528; 1554-351X; 1554-3528
• DOI: 10.3758/s13428-021-01732-0

We collected visual and semantic similarity norms for a set of photographic images comprising 120 recognizable objects/animals and 120 indoor/outdoor scenes. Human observers rated the similarity of pairs of images within four categories of stimuli—inanimate objects, animals, indoor scenes and outdoor scenes—via Amazon's Mechanical Turk. We performed multidimensional scaling (MDS) on the collected similarity ratings to visualize the perceived similarity for each image category, for both visual and semantic ratings. The MDS solutions revealed the expected similarity relationships between images within each category, along with intuitively sensible differences between visual and semantic similarity relationships for each category. Stress tests performed on the MDS solutions indicated that the MDS analyses captured meaningful levels of variance in the similarity data. These stimuli, associated norms and naming data are made available to all researchers, and should provide a useful resource for researchers of vision, memory and conceptual knowledge wishing to run experiments using well-parameterized stimulus sets.