Abstract
This article presents the NeoHelp visual stimulus set created to facilitate investigation of need-of-help recognition with clinical and normative populations of different ages, including children. Need-of-help recognition is one aspect of socioemotional development and a necessary precondition for active helping. The NeoHelp consists of picture pairs showing everyday situations: The first item in a pair depicts a child needing help to achieve a goal; the second one shows the child achieving the goal. Pictures of birds in analogue situations are also included. These control stimuli enable implementation of a human-animal categorization task which serves to separate behavioral correlates specific to need-of-help recognition from general differentiation processes. It is a concern in experimental research to ensure that results do not relate to systematic perceptual differences when comparing responses to categories of different content. Therefore, we not only derived the NeoHelp-pictures within a pair from one another by altering as little as possible, but also assessed their perceptual similarity empirically. We show that NeoHelp-picture pairs are very similar regarding low-level perceptual properties across content categories. We obtained data from 60 children in a broad age range (4 to 13 years) for three different paradigms, in order to assess whether the intended categorization and differentiation could be observed reliably in a normative population. Our results demonstrate that children can differentiate the pictures' content regarding both need-of-help category as well as species as intended in spite of the high perceptual similarities. We provide standard response characteristics (hit rates and response times) that are useful for future selection of stimuli and comparison of results across studies. We show that task requirements coherently determine which aspects of the pictures influence response characteristics. Thus, we present NeoHelp, the first open-access standardized visual stimuli set for investigation of need-of-help recognition and invite researchers to use and extend it.
Highlights
It is a challenge to construct research in such a way that enables valid conclusions to be drawn about what particular manipulations lead to distinct outcomes
These results show that the Need-of-Help Recognition (NeoHelp) stimuli are reliably categorized by a diverse group of children both according to help-content as well as to species categories
[45]) for NoH and no-NoH picture pairs ranged from 73% to 91% for human depictions, showing that objective picture properties were highly similar within these picture pairs
Summary
It is a challenge to construct research in such a way that enables valid conclusions to be drawn about what particular manipulations lead to distinct outcomes. Scientific research benefits from access to pre-tested standardized stimulus sets since they provide information about the properties of the stimuli and their characteristics as perceived by an average population. In this way, standardized stimuli decrease the likelihood of confounding effects of experimental manipulations with those of irrelevant stimulus dimensions. Researchers are interested in attributing differences in outcomes to only one of those two dimensions These are often confounded and changes in one can lead to unintended effects in the other. Researchers need to ensure that the control of perceptual properties does not compromise construct validity or recognizability of the stimuli used
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