Norms for pictures of proper names: contrasting famous people and well-known places in younger and older adults

Abstract

Proper names comprise a class of labels that arbitrarily nominate specific entities, such as people and places. Compared to common nouns, retrieving proper names is more challenging. Thus, they constitute good alternative semantic categories for psycholinguistic and neurocognitive research and intervention. The ability to retrieve proper names is known to decrease with aging. Likewise, their retrieval may differ across their different categories (e.g., people and places) given their specific associated knowledge. Therefore, proper names’ stimuli require careful selection due to their high dependence on prior experiences. Notably, normative datasets for pictures of proper names are scarce and hardly have considered the influence of aging and categories. The current study established culturally adapted norms for proper names’ pictures (N = 80) from an adult sample (N = 107), in psycholinguistic measures (naming and categorization scores) and evaluative dimensions (fame, familiarity, distinctiveness, arousal, and representational quality). These norms were contrasted across different categories (famous people and well-known places) and age groups (younger and older adults). Additionally, the correlations between all variables were examined. Proper names’ pictures were named and categorized above chance and overall rated as familiar, famous, distinctive, and of high representational quality. Age effects were observed across all variables, except familiarity. Category effects were occasionally observed. Finally, the correlations between the psycholinguistic measures and all rated dimensions suggest the relevance of controlling for these dimensions when assessing naming abilities. The current norms provide a relevant aging-adapted dataset that is publicly available for research and intervention purposes.