Development and characterization of a standardized stimuli set of 240 famous faces in Quebec

Resumen de los autores

Famous faces are especially well suited to studying the semantic component of face processing because they carry a sense of familiarity shared across individuals. Recognizing famous faces is not only relevant to research, but it is also clinically informative. Famous-face recognition deficits are observed in prosopagnosia and neurodegenerative disease. They are differentially affected across dementia syndromes, making their assessment useful for differential diagnosis. Testing familiar face processing requires stimuli suited to a specific geographic and sociocultural context, which has led to the development of standardized famous-face databases in France, Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal. However, no such standardized set currently exists for the Quebec population. We therefore created a stimuli set of 240 locally and internationally known famous people across four categories (politicians, singers, actors, and athletes), spanning different time periods and including famous people of different races, ethnicities, ages, and genders. Through an online survey on Qualtrics, adults aged 40 to 79 from Quebec are rating the famous faces on distinctiveness, familiarity, valence, and name frequency, alongside measures of famous face recognition, naming, knowledge, and agreement. Descriptive statistics were obtained for each famous face, and the standardized stimuli set will be available in open access once data collection is complete. Future directions include the development of new cognitive tests for face processing impairments, notably in neurodegenerative disorders.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Mitrikeski, N. M., Leclerc, M., Geng, Z., & Montembeault, M. (2026). Development and characterization of a standardized stimuli set of 240 famous faces in Quebec. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/27csj_v1/