Prior Knowledge Norms for Naming Country Outlines: An Open Stimulus Set

Abstract

Paired-associate stimuli are an important tool in learning and memory research. In cognitive psychology, many studies use materials of which the learners are expected to have little to no prior knowledge. Despite their theoretical usefulness, conclusions from these studies are difficult to generalize to real-world learning contexts, where learners can be expected to have varying degrees of prior knowledge. Here, we present an ecologically valid stimulus set with 112 country outline-name pairs, and report response times and prior knowledge for these items in 285 largely Western European participants. Prior knowledge per item ranged from very high (94.4%) to zero (0.3%), thereby allowing researchers to select materials of which participants can be expected to have any given amount of prior knowledge. As such, this database provides a useful tool for research on real-world learning. The database can be accessed at: https://osf.io/q25rd/.

Keywords

• learning
• stimulus development
• response accuracy
• response speed
• long-term memory