Department of Psychology and Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
Department of Psychology and Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany ; Faculty of Society and Economics, Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, Kleve, Germany.
PLoS One. 2014 Jan 7;9(1):e84373. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0084373. eCollection 2014.
This article presents the NeoHelp visual stimulus set created to facilitate investigation of need-of-help recognition with clinical and normative populations of different ages, including children. Need-of-help recognition is one aspect of socioemotional development and a necessary precondition for active helping. The NeoHelp consists of picture pairs showing everyday situations: The first item in a pair depicts a child needing help to achieve a goal; the second one shows the child achieving the goal. Pictures of birds in analogue situations are also included. These control stimuli enable implementation of a human-animal categorization task which serves to separate behavioral correlates specific to need-of-help recognition from general differentiation processes. It is a concern in experimental research to ensure that results do not relate to systematic perceptual differences when comparing responses to categories of different content. Therefore, we not only derived the NeoHelp-pictures within a pair from one another by altering as little as possible, but also assessed their perceptual similarity empirically. We show that NeoHelp-picture pairs are very similar regarding low-level perceptual properties across content categories. We obtained data from 60 children in a broad age range (4 to 13 years) for three different paradigms, in order to assess whether the intended categorization and differentiation could be observed reliably in a normative population. Our results demonstrate that children can differentiate the pictures' content regarding both need-of-help category as well as species as intended in spite of the high perceptual similarities. We provide standard response characteristics (hit rates and response times) that are useful for future selection of stimuli and comparison of results across studies. We show that task requirements coherently determine which aspects of the pictures influence response characteristics. Thus, we present NeoHelp, the first open-access standardized visual stimuli set for investigation of need-of-help recognition and invite researchers to use and extend it.
本文介绍了 NeoHelp 视觉刺激集，旨在促进对不同年龄段的临床和正常人群的帮助需求识别的研究，包括儿童。帮助需求识别是社会情感发展的一个方面，也是积极帮助的必要前提。NeoHelp 由展示日常情况的图片对组成：第一对图片描绘了一个需要帮助实现目标的孩子；第二对图片显示孩子实现了目标。类似情况下的鸟类图片也包括在内。这些控制刺激可以实施人类-动物分类任务，用于将与帮助需求识别相关的行为相关性与一般区分过程分开。在实验研究中，人们关注的是确保结果与比较不同内容类别的反应时不涉及系统的感知差异。因此，我们不仅通过尽可能少的改变来从一对中得出 NeoHelp 图片，而且还通过经验评估了它们的感知相似性。我们表明，NeoHelp 图片对在内容类别之间具有非常相似的低水平感知属性。我们为三个不同的范式从广泛年龄范围（4 至 13 岁）的 60 名儿童中获得了数据，以评估在正常人群中是否可以可靠地观察到预期的分类和区分。我们的结果表明，尽管感知相似性很高，但儿童可以根据需要帮助的类别和物种来区分图片的内容。我们提供了标准的反应特征（击中率和反应时间），这对于未来选择刺激和跨研究比较结果非常有用。我们表明，任务要求一致地确定了哪些图片方面影响反应特征。因此，我们提出了 NeoHelp，这是第一个用于研究帮助需求识别的开放获取标准化视觉刺激集，并邀请研究人员使用和扩展它。
