Brodeur Mathieu B, Guérard Katherine, Bouras Maria
Douglas Mental Health University Institute and Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montréal (Québec), Canada.
Department of Psychology, Université de Moncton, Moncton (New Brunswick), Canada.
PLoS One. 2014 Sep 11;9(9):e106953. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0106953. eCollection 2014.
Researchers have only recently started to take advantage of the developments in technology and communication for sharing data and documents. However, the exchange of experimental material has not taken advantage of this progress yet. In order to facilitate access to experimental material, the Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS) project was created as a free standardized set of visual stimuli accessible to all researchers, through a normative database. The BOSS is currently the largest existing photo bank providing norms for more than 15 dimensions (e.g. familiarity, visual complexity, manipulability, etc.), making the BOSS an extremely useful research tool and a mean to homogenize scientific data worldwide. The first phase of the BOSS was completed in 2010, and contained 538 normative photos. The second phase of the BOSS project presented in this article, builds on the previous phase by adding 930 new normative photo stimuli. New categories of concepts were introduced, including animals, building infrastructures, body parts, and vehicles and the number of photos in other categories was increased. All new photos of the BOSS were normalized relative to their name, familiarity, visual complexity, object agreement, viewpoint agreement, and manipulability. The availability of these norms is a precious asset that should be considered for characterizing the stimuli as a function of the requirements of research and for controlling for potential confounding effects.
研究人员直到最近才开始利用技术和通信的发展来共享数据和文档。然而，实验材料的交换尚未利用这一进展。为了便于获取实验材料，标准化刺激库（BOSS）项目应运而生，它是一个免费的标准化视觉刺激集，所有研究人员都可以通过一个规范数据库访问。BOSS目前是现存最大的照片库，为超过15个维度（如熟悉度、视觉复杂度、可操作性等）提供规范，这使得BOSS成为一个极其有用的研究工具，也是使全球科学数据同质化的一种手段。BOSS的第一阶段于2010年完成，包含538张规范照片。本文介绍的BOSS项目的第二阶段，在前一阶段的基础上增加了930个新的规范照片刺激。引入了新的概念类别，包括动物、建筑基础设施、身体部位和车辆，其他类别的照片数量也有所增加。BOSS的所有新照片都根据其名称、熟悉度、视觉复杂度、物体一致性、视角一致性和可操作性进行了标准化。这些规范的可用性是一项宝贵资产，在根据研究要求表征刺激以及控制潜在混杂效应时应予以考虑。
