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A Test for Measuring Recognition and Naming of Landmarks
Journal article   Peer reviewed

A Test for Measuring Recognition and Naming of Landmarks

Daniel Tranel, Nonso Enekwechi and Ken Manzel
Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology, Vol.27(1), pp.102-126
02/23/2005
DOI: 10.1080/138033990513663
PMID: 15814445

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Abstract

There have been considerable gains in recent years in understanding cognitive and neural correlates for retrieval of various types of knowledge, such as the meanings and lexical forms for categories such as familiar faces, animals and tools, and actions. An important category that has been largely neglected so far is landmarks, and one likely reason for this is a lack of suitable stimulus materials. Here, we report a study in which we designed a Landmark Recognition and Naming Test. The test contains 65 natural (e.g., "Old Faithful") and artifactual (e.g., "U.S. Capitol") landmarks from around the world. Preliminary recognition and naming data were collected from 68 normal participants (37 female). We also obtained data about the participants (e.g., educational level, participants' experience traveling to national parks), the stimuli (e.g., visual complexity, image agreement), and participant-stimulus interactions (e.g., familiarity, age of acquisition), and analyzed how such factors influenced landmark recognition and naming. There was a pronounced sex-related difference in landmark recognition, favoring men; however, men and women performed similarly in landmark naming. We provide here extensive data regarding the stimuli, and we encourage other investigators to make use of our stimuli and data in future investigations of landmark recognition and naming. This work was supported by Program Project Grant NINDS NS19632. N.E. is supported in part by the Iowa Biosciences Advantage Program at the University of Iowa, and by a minority supplement grant to D.T. (NINDS NS19632). We thank Jocelyn Spoon and Travis Jewett for assistance in collecting and analyzing the data, and Kathy Jones for help in scheduling the subjects.

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