An Ecological Alternative to Snodgrass & Vanderwart: 360 High Quality Colour Images with Norms for Seven Psycholinguistic Variables

This work presents a new set of 360 high quality colour images belonging to 23 semantic subcategories. Two hundred and thirty-six Spanish speakers named the items and also provided data from seven relevant psycholinguistic variables: age of acquisition, familiarity, manipulability, name agreement, typicality and visual complexity. Furthermore, we also present lexical frequency data derived from Internet search hits. Apart from the high number of variables evaluated, knowing that it affects the processing of stimuli, this new set presents important advantages over other similar image corpi: (a) this corpus presents a broad number of subcategories and images; for example, this will permit researchers to select stimuli of appropriate difficulty as required, (e.g., to deal with problems derived from ceiling effects); (b) the fact of using coloured stimuli provides a more realistic, ecologically-valid, representation of real life objects. In sum, this set of stimuli provides a useful tool for research on visual object-and word- processing, both in neurological patients and in healthy controls

The Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS), a New Set of 480 Normative Photos of Objects to Be Used as Visual Stimuli in Cognitive Research

There are currently stimuli with published norms available to study several psychological aspects of language and visual cognitions. Norms represent valuable information that can be used as experimental variables or systematically controlled to limit their potential influence on another experimental manipulation. The present work proposes 480 photo stimuli that have been normalized for name, category, familiarity, visual complexity, object agreement, viewpoint agreement, and manipulability. Stimuli are also available in grayscale, blurred, scrambled, and line-drawn version. This set of objects, the Bank Of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS), was created specifically to meet the needs of scientists in cognition, vision and psycholinguistics who work with photo stimuli

Behavioral, cognitive, and adaptive development in infants with autism spectrum disorder in the first 2 years of life

BACKGROUND: To delineate the early progression of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptoms, this study investigated developmental characteristics of infants at high familial risk for ASD (HR), and infants at low risk (LR). METHODS: Participants included 210 HR and 98 LR infants across 4 sites with comparable behavioral data at age 6, 12, and 24 months assessed in the domains of cognitive development (Mullen Scales of Early Learning), adaptive skills (Vineland Adaptive Behavioral Scales), and early behavioral features of ASD (Autism Observation Scale for Infants). Participants evaluated according to the DSM-IV-TR criteria at 24 months and categorized as ASD-positive or ASD-negative were further stratified by empirically derived cutoff scores using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule yielding four groups: HR-ASD-High, HR-ASD-Moderate (HR-ASD-Mod), HR-ASD-Negative (HR-Neg), and LR-ASD-Negative (LR-Neg). RESULTS: The four groups demonstrated different developmental trajectories that became increasingly distinct from 6 to 24 months across all domains. At 6 months, the HR-ASD-High group demonstrated less advanced Gross Motor and Visual Reception skills compared with the LR-Neg group. By 12 months, the HR-ASD-High group demonstrated increased behavioral features of ASD and decreased cognitive and adaptive functioning compared to the HR-Neg and LR-Neg groups. By 24 months, both the HR-ASD-High and HR-ASD-Moderate groups demonstrated differences from the LR- and HR-Neg groups in all domains. CONCLUSIONS: These findings reveal atypical sensorimotor development at 6 months of age which is associated with ASD at 24 months in the most severely affected group of infants. Sensorimotor differences precede the unfolding of cognitive and adaptive deficits and behavioral features of autism across the 6- to 24-month interval. The less severely affected group demonstrates later symptom onset, in the second year of life, with initial differences in the social-communication domain. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s11689-015-9117-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users