Recognition and naming test of the Portuguese population for national and international celebrities

Abstract

Research on familiar faces has been conducted in different countries and resort to celebrities faces, stimuli that are highly constrained by geographic context and cultural peculiarities, since many celebrities are only famous in particular countries. Despite their relevance to psychological research, there are no normative studies of celebrities’ facial recognition in Portugal. We developed a database with 160 black and white pictures of famous persons' faces in this work. The data collection took place in two different studies. In study 1, participants were asked to recognize and name celebrity faces; while in study 2, celebrity names were rated for AoA, familiarity, and distinctiveness. Data were gathered from two different samples of Portuguese young adults aged between 18 and 25 years old, and both procedures were performed online through a questionnaire created in Qualtrics software. This database provides ratings of AoA, familiarity, facial distinctiveness, recognition rate, and naming rate for each celebrity, which will allow further selection of celebrities, based on these five attributes, for studies using Portuguese samples. Also, possible relationships between these five variables were analyzed and presented, highlighting facial distinctiveness as a predictor for both naming and recognition rate of celebrity faces.