foodcast

Foodcast Research Image Database (FRIDa)

The Foodcast Research Image Database (FRIDa) is a comprehensive collection of both food and nonfood items that can be used for non-commercial purposes. FRIDa has been validated and the results have been published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (Foroni, Pergola, Argiris, Rumiati, 2013). Please don’t forget to cite this reference if you use FRIDa! By registering in the site you can download the database images and validation data for each image. In short, the features that make FRIDa a unique choice for cognitive research are the following:

  • Quantity: collection of almost 900 pictures each representing unique items (see e.g., Figure), with extremely poor overlap in terms of naming commonalities between the items;
  • Diversity: high heterogeneity across categories (food, tools, natural objects, animal, scenes) and within categories (e.g., natural food vs. transformed food vs. rotten food);
  • Uniformity: resolution and image processing are uniform and data on visual and verbal features of the stimuli are provided;
  • Flexibility: ratings on a variety of cognitively relevant variables are included, hence providing researchers with the possibility to choose stimuli according to desired variable;
  • Development: the authors are collecting more data from new participants to increase the reliability of the database from different cohorts.

The database comprises open-source images belonging to one of eight different categories: (1) natural-food, (2) transformed-food, (3) rotten-food, (4) natural-nonfood items, (5) artificial food- related objects, (6) artificial objects, (7) animals, and (8) scenes. All images are copyright-free color photographs, selected from a web-based search and resized to a standard dimension of 530x530 pixels.By registering in the site you can download the pictures (available in bmp-format and jpeg- format) and the validation data for each image.

Data on basic visual parameters, such as stimulus size, mean brightness and relative power of high spatial frequencies are included for each individual image. Verbal frequency estimates in Italian language are also provided for each stimulus. The validation procedure consists of ratings on: (1) Valence (i.e. pleasantness of the image as positive or negative), (2) Arousal (i.e. emotional salience of the images as degree of stimulation), (3) Familiarity (i.e. frequency with which a person encounters the item in daily life), (4) Typicality (i.e. how typical the represented item is for its category), and (5) Ambiguity (i.e. ease of identifying the item represented in the image). For food items, in addition to the aforementioned variables, data were collected for: (1) Perceived calorie-content (i.e. estimate of calorie content in 100g), (2), Perceived immediate-edibility (i.e. amount of additional work required to make the food immediately edible), and (3) Perceived level of transformation (i.e. amount of preparation that was required to render the food as represented in the image).

The validation ratings for each variable will include: mean participant ratings (Mean), median participant ratings (Median), standard deviation of this mean (SD), and number of participant ratings (N). Ratings are also provided split by gender.