Reexamining the Snodgrass and Corwin 1988 picture identification norms

Snodgrass and Corwin (1988) provided a database of 150 fragmented pictures identified by subjects only 35% of the time. However, recent research by Koch, Abbey, and Schmidt in 1995 with these pictures has yielded higher identification rates. The present study examined the difference in identification rates between Koch, et al., 1995 and Snodgrass and Corwin in 1988. 85 subjects were given 25 min. to identify all 150 pictures from Snodgrass and Corwin. Of the 150 pictures, 95 were identified more than 35% of the time. Since Snodgrass and Corwin used an implicit-learning task while the present study used an object-identification task, the present findings suggest that identification rates may be specific to the type of object-recognition task employed.