Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The Author Recognition Test (ART) is a test that has been widely used for decades to estimate print exposure, due to its reliability and objectivity. In this contribution, we present an updated, balanced, and inclusive version of the English ART. We created this by constructing a contemporary item pool based on recent bestsellers and award-winning authors which balances author genre and literary level. We validate the updated English ART using item-response theory analysis and compare it with a commonly used version for American English, the Acheson et al. (2008) ART. Additionally, we examine how participant-level variables such as age and educational level interact with item-level properties such as genre and literary level to modulate recognition probability. Our results indicate that the updated ART is reliable and the test is comparable with the Acheson version in terms of difficulty and discriminative power. Additionally, reader characteristics and author characteristics systematically modulate print exposure. We discuss the implications of our findings and the suitability of the new version of the ART.