JURICS stimulus set - Joint Universal Real-world Images with Continuous States: Development and validation

Researchers often use highly controlled stimuli such as uniformly colored patches or differently oriented gratings or shapes, to study perception and cognition. Recent studies accumulate evidence that the representation of real-world objects differs from the processing of well-controlled “simple” stimuli (Asp et al., 2021; Brady & Störmer, 2020). Real-world objects have many high-order properties that are not entirely visual but rather semantic or categorical, such as animacy, typicality, canonical size or viewpoint, etc. One of such properties is the state, dynamic transformation of an object without changing its object identity (e.g., open vs. closed box). Previous studies used states (pairs of exemplars in different states, opened book A vs. closed book B, empty glass A vs. full glass B; Balaban et al., 2020; Brady, et al., 2013; Markov et al., 2021) to study representations of objects in working memory and long-term memory. However, the states in these tasks were always extremely distinct (e.g., fully open or fully closed), whereas many research questions require continuous feature manipulations. We shot pictures of objects from 98 basic object categories. Each category was represented by two exemplars and each exemplar was represented by 20 continuously changing states. This resulted in 3,920 unique static JPG/PNG images and 196 animated GIFs for the dynamic state change of each exemplar (e.g., opening or closing). Following the standards of complex stimulus validation (Snodgrass & Vanderwart, 1980; Brodeur et al., 2010), we collected a set of normative parameters for our stimuli in a group of naive observers: object category, the name of the exemplar, the familiarity of the exemplar, the visual complexity of the exemplar, the name of the dynamic state, the name of the final state, the familiarity of the changing state. The stimulus set and norms will be available on the website: https://www.ymarkov.com/stimuli-base