Mary Vanderwart’s research while affiliated with The Graduate Center, CUNY and other places

Cross-form priming of words by pictures was compared to within-form priming of words by words in a lexical decision task. For prime—target pairs containing repetitions of a concept or semantically related concepts, pictures provided priming of word targets in magnitudes at least as large as the priming provided by words themselves. Such equivalent priming by surface forms occurred for concrete word targets and for abstract word targets in pairs comprising a variety of semantic associations. Recognition memory for pairs in the lexical decision task revealed both form-dependent and form-independent components in the episodic trace. The results are interpreted as consistent with a single system of semantic representation accessed in common by both surface forms, rather than separate form-specific semantic systems.

In this article we present a standardized set of 260 pictures for use in experiments investigating differences and similarities in the processing of pictures and words. The pictures are black-and-white line drawings executed according to a set of rules that provide consistency of pictorial representation. The pictures have been standardized on four variables of central relevance to memory and cognitive processing: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. The intercorrelations among the four measures were low, suggesting that they are indices of different attributes of the pictures. The concepts were selected to provide exemplars from several widely studied semantic categories. Sources of naming variance, and mean familiarity and complexity of the exemplars, differed significantly across the set of categories investigated. The potential significance of each of the normative variables to a number of semantic and episodic memory tasks is discussed.

Presents a standardized set of 260 pictures for use in experiments investigating differences and similarities in the processing of pictures and words. The pictures are black-and-white line drawings executed according to a set of rules that provide consistency of pictorial representation. They have been standardized on 4 variables of central relevance to memory and cognitive processing: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. The intercorrelations among the 4 measures were low, suggesting that they are indices of different attributes of the pictures. The concepts were selected to provide exemplars from several widely studied semantic categories. Sources of naming variance, and mean familiarity and complexity of the exemplars, differed significantly across the set of categories investigated. The potential significance of each of the normative variables to a number of semantic and episodic memory tasks is discussed. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).