Living things and artifacts: categorial effects in black-and-white picture naming tasks?

Abstract

Patients with acquired brain injury may have difficulties in processing a unique semantic category. In patients with the most common semantic deficits, living things is the most commonly compromised domain. Nevertheless, the results of assessing healthy participants are contradictory. Most studies with healthy participants reported better performance with the category of living things, whereas other studies have reported better performance with artifacts, depending on the type of material used. Although researchers generally use black-and-white pictures to assess semantic categories, this kind of material omits an essential perceptual attribute in processing living things: colour. This study assessed a group of young healthy participants to determine differences in naming living things and artifacts in a naming task using black-and-white pictures. The stimuli used were matched according to the major lexical-semantic variables: name agreement, visual complexity, lexical frequency, conceptual familiarity, age of acquisition, number of syllables, and number of phonemes. The results show that healthy participants are more accurate and faster at naming when categorizing artifacts and that artifacts have an advantage over the category living things in which colour is a key attribute (animals and fruits/vegetables). This advantage is lost in relation to the category body parts in which colour is not an essential attribute for their recognition.