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PubMed1988

The fractionation of retrograde amnesia.

This single case study describes our investigations of the retrograde memory deficit of a patient who became severely and selectively amnesic after an encephalitic illness. On clinical assessment his retrograde deficit for both personal and public events appeared to encompass his entire adult life. However, he retained knowledge of words introduced into the vocabulary during the retrograde period. The experimental investigation documented his inability to recall, recognize, and place in temporal order the names and faces of famous people for all time periods sampled. By contrast, his recall of either a famous face or a famous name was significantly facilitated by the verbal cue of the person's first name and initial of the surname (i.e., Margaret T...). His performance on a test of "familiarity" that required him to select the famous name or the famous face from two distractors (unknown) was within normal limits. It is argued that names and faces of famous people are represented in more than one system: both in a vocabulary-like fact memory system that is preserved and also in a congnitively mediated schemata that in this case is functionally inoperative.

Amnesia↗
PubMed2001

'I know your name but not your face': explaining modality-based differences in access to biographical knowledge in a patient with retrograde amnesia.

In current functional models of person recognition it is proposed that there exists a single common body of semantic information concerning people accessible from all modalities (e.g. names, faces). In this paper, we present evidence that challenges this view. Two experiments are discussed investigating residual autobiographical and public knowledge in a patient suffering from retrograde amnesia. Knowledge about people was investigated in each case by asking a series of questions, ranging from the very general to the very specific. Experiment 1 examined knowledge about famous people. The results showed that the patient accessed more information about famous people when cued with names than when cued with faces. Experiment 2 examined knowledge about people known personally to the patient. Again, the same pattern of results emerged. While the patient responded accurately to all questions posed with name cues, her ability to recall the same information when prompted with face cues was clearly inferior. This modality-based difference in accessing biographical knowledge is discussed in relation to models of person recognition.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2002

Famous face recognition and naming test: a normative study.

Tests of famous face recognition and naming, and tasks assessing semantic knowledge about famous people after presentation either of their faces or their names are often used in the neuropsychological examination of aphasic, amnesic and demented patients. A total of 187 normal subjects took part in this study. The aim was to collect normative data for a newly devised test including five subtests: famous face naming, fame judgement after face presentation and after name presentation, semantic knowledge about famous people after face presentation and after name presentation. Norms were calculated taking into account demographic variables such as age, sex and education and adjusted scores were used to determine inferential cut-off scores and to compute equivalent scores. Multiple regression analyses showed that age and education influenced significantly the performance on most subtests, but sex had no effect on any of them. Scores of the subtest evaluating fame judgements after name presentation were significantly influenced only by education. The only subtest whose scores were not influenced by any demographic variable was fame judgement after face presentation.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

Treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder using clomipramine in a very old patient.

OBJECTIVE: To describe the effect of the tricyclic drug clomipramine in a very old patient with obsessive-compulsive disorder and Alzheimer dementia. CASE SUMMARY: A 93-year-old woman had a history of obsessive-compulsive disorder since early adulthood. The obsession consisted of remembering names of famous people and the compulsion consisted of excessive list making. With the onset of memory loss secondary to Alzheimer disease, she became increasingly anxious and compulsive as a result of a failure to remember. After nine weeks on fluoxetine she became jittery and more confused. After a two-week wash-out period, she was given a nine-week course of clomipramine that was carefully titrated up to a therapeutic concentration. RESULTS: At the completion of clomipramine treatment, the patient no longer felt driven to recall the names of famous people. Her score from the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale dropped from 29 to 3. Her Folstein Mini-Mental State Examination score increased from 21 to 23. CONCLUSIONS: Clomipramine appeared much more effective and better tolerated than fluoxetine in this very old patient despite its potential anticholinergic effect and the coexistence of Alzheimer disease.

Aged↗
PubMed2006

The false fame illusion in people with memories about a previous life.

The present study examined whether individuals with full-blown memories of highly implausible events are prone to commit source monitoring errors. Participants reporting previous-life memories and those without such memories completed a false fame task. This task provides an index of source monitoring errors (i.e., misclassifying familiar non-famous names as famous names). Participants with previous-life memories had a greater tendency to judge the names of previously presented non-famous people as famous than control participants. The two groups did not differ in terms of correct recognition of new non-famous names and famous names. Although dissociation, cognitive failures, sleep-related experiences, depressive symptoms, and signs of psychological distress were all significantly higher in participants with previous-life memories than in controls, these variables did not predict the false fame illusion.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Different patterns of autobiographical memory loss in semantic dementia and medial temporal lobe amnesia: a challenge to consolidation theory.

Temporally graded retrograde memory loss, with a disproportionate impairment of recent relative to remote memories, is considered a hallmark of medial temporal lobe amnesia. According to consolidation theory, the hippocampal complex, which includes the hippocampal formation, parahippocampal gyrus, the entorhinal and perirhinal cortex, plays a time-limited role in memory, needed only until consolidation in the neocortex is complete (Squire, Psychological Review 1992; 99: 195-231). Recent support for this theory comes from findings of a reverse gradient in people with semantic dementia with neocortical degeneration but a relatively preserved hippocampal complex (Hodges and Graham, Neuropsychologia 1998; 36: 803-25). Consolidation theory is challenged by evidence that remote autobiographical memory is not always spared in amnesia (Nadel and Moscovitch, Current Opinion in Neurobiology 1997; 7: 217-27) and that semantic memory becomes highly personalized in semantic dementia (Snowden et al., Memory 1995; 3: 225-46). According to Nadel and Moscovitch, the hippocampal complex is needed to retain and retrieve detailed memories of autobiographical episodes no matter how old they are. To test consolidation theory against the opposing view, we investigated the role of the hippocampal complex in recent and remote autobiographical and personal semantic memory by contrasting the memory of a semantic dementia patient, EL, with that of an amnesic patient, KC, using family photographs as recall cues. KC demonstrated a complete loss of autobiographical episodes with a sparing of autobiographical facts; EL demonstrated well-preserved memory for episodes with a reverse gradient for personally relevant names. The influence of autobiographical significance on memory for names of public figures was examined further by comparing the effect that familiarity and recollection had on recognition of names of famous people and famous places. EL's memory was influenced by autobiographical significance, whereas KC's was not. We propose that the hippocampal complex plays a permanent role in the storage and retrieval of autobiographical episodes and that autobiographical significance may affect semantic representations.

Aged↗
PubMed2003

Inappropriate association of semantics and context to novel stimuli can give rise to the false recognition of unfamiliar people.

This paper reports further experiments with a patient (MR) who has a tendency to claim that unfamous people are familiar together with good ability at identifying truly famous people. The first experiment examines the role that the typicality of stimuli plays in his false recognition. Although, typicality may have some influence over false recognition (as it does for normal controls) there is little evidence to suggest that MR is over-reliant on such information. It is unlikely that perceptual fluency can entirely explain his deficit. This is bolstered by a further study using morphed images of famous and unfamous faces, suggesting that false recognition is associated with inappropriate retrieval of semantic-biographical information. It is argued that MR's judgement of 'fame' is subjectively appropriate, given the information that he retrieves. This information is thought to derive from currently activated, or recently activated, contextual information which becomes inappropriately bound to the novel stimulus, giving rise to a false sense of familiarity. These findings underscore the importance of viewing memory as an attributional process, whereby current mental constructions/processes are attributed to some event(s) in the past.

Case-Control Studies↗
PubMed2003

Slowly progressive defect in recognition of familiar people in a patient with right anterior temporal atrophy.

We report the case of a patient (C.O.) who showed a selective defect in the recognition of familiar people, with very mild disease progression during a period of 30 months resulting from focal atrophy of the right temporal lobe. On formal neuropsychological testing, C.O. obtained high scores on tests of general intelligence, episodic memory, language, executive functions, selective attention, visual recognition and visual-spatial abilities. On more specific tasks of familiar and unfamiliar face recognition, C.O. scored above the controls' means on perceptual tests, but obtained highly pathological results on amnesic-associative tests. His disorder of recognition of familiar people was not due to loss of person-specific information, since he obtained highly abnormal naming scores when presented with photographs of famous people but borderline or mildly abnormal scores in a tasks in which he had to name celebrities from verbal definitions. On the other hand, C.O.'s recognition disorder could not be considered to be a form of 'associative prosopagnosia' since a similar defect was observed when he was requested to access information about famous persons through their voice rather than their face. Two alternative interpretations are advanced to explain C.O.'s inability to access his relatively spared person-specific knowledge not only through the person's face but also through the person's voice. The first hypothesis is that, before accessing the person-specific information, unimodal recognition channels must converge into a multimodal, non-verbal person-recognition system and that the right anterior temporal cortices play a crucial role in this integrative activity. The second hypothesis is that the face-recognition units have privileged access to person-specific semantic knowledge and that other recognition subsystems require coactivation of the face-recognition units in order to access person-specific semantic information.

Atrophy↗
PubMed1996

Identification of famous faces and famous names in early Alzheimer's disease. Relationship to anterograde episodic and general semantic memory.

We assessed remote memory in 33 patients with dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT) with Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores between 17 and 30, and 30 matched controls using a Famous Faces Test and Famous Names Test designed to assess face recognition, identification and naming, and name recognition and identification, respectively, together with a range of anterograde episodic and semantic memory tests. Patients with DAT were impaired on all components of the remote memory tests, i.e. famous face recognition, identification and naming, and famous name recognition and identification. There was also evidence of a modest temporal gradient, with relatively greater impairment of more recent memory, which may be artefactual resulting from the very insidious onset of their anterograde amnesia. In contrast to the uniform impairment of anterograde memory, there was considerable heterogeneity in performance on remote memory. Although the DAT patient group's performance on remote memory measures was impaired with respect to controls, some patients had significant impairment on all measures, whereas others had intact remote memory. Overall, there was only a weak correlation between dementia severity and remote memory, and no correlation between performance on the Faces and Names tests and measures of anterograde memory. At a cognitive level, the deficit in face and name processing in DAT involved recognition, identification and naming. This would suggest that so called 'face and name recognition units', semantic knowledge of famous persons and post-semantic processing are all affected by the disease. There was also supporting evidence for the concept that recognition of famous faces and names both draw on common sources. Similar results were found for face and name identification. This suggests that face and name recognition units are closely linked, and that identification of a face or name accesses the same central pool of semantic knowledge regarding the famous person. Performance on famous names tests correlated, to a limited degree, with that on general semantic tests, suggesting that knowledge of famous people, at least as accessed by names, is associated with general semantic memory. By contrast, no correlation was found between performance on the famous faces and on other general semantic tasks.

Aged↗
PubMed2004

'Like Minds, Like Mine': a New Zealand project to counter the stigma and discrimination associated with mental illness.

OBJECTIVE: To demonstrate how mass media advertising and community education has been successfully used in New Zealand as part of a comprehensive public health project to reduce stigma and discrimination associated with mental illness. CONCLUSIONS: The involvement of people with experience of mental illness in the campaign has been critical to its success. Advertising involving the stories of well-known and famous people who have experienced mental illness has created significant interest, awareness and improved attitudes among the general public. Local community education and other follow-up activities have also contributed to this success.

Advertising↗
PubMed1995

Developmental disturbance of access to biographical information and people's names: a single-case study.

The paper describes the case of a person (GB) without any clinical evidence of cerebral disease who showed a specific impairment in the retrieval of biographical information, including names, about famous people. This deficit appeared while GB scored normally in different long-term memory tasks, and in object naming tasks. Moreover, he showed no impairment in the structural encoding and the recognition of faces. His specific impairment is interpreted both in terms of Bruce and Young's (1986) functional model of person recognition and in terms of the more recent Burton et al. (1990) interactive activation version of the Bruce and Young model.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Human brain potential correlates of repetition priming in face and name recognition.

We investigated repetition priming in the recognition of famous people by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and reaction times (RTs). Participants performed speeded two-choice responses depending on whether or not a stimulus showed a famous person. In Experiment 1, a facilitation was found in RTs to famous (but not to unfamiliar) faces when primed by the same face shown in an earlier priming phase of the experiment. In ERPs, an influence of repetition priming was observed neither for the N170 nor for a temporal N250 component which in previous studies had been shown to be sensitive to immediate face repetitions. ERPs to primed unfamiliar faces were more negative over right occipitotemporal areas than those to unprimed faces, but this effect was specific for repetitions of the same image, consistent with recent findings. In contrast, ERPs to primed familiar faces were more positive than those to unprimed faces at parietal sites from 500-600 ms after face onset, and these priming effects were comparable regardless of whether the same or a different image of the celebrity had served as prime. In Experiment 2, similar results were found for name recognition-a facilitation in RTs to primed familiar but not unfamiliar names, and a parietal positivity to primed names around 500-600 ms. ERP repetition effects showed comparable topographies for faces and names, consistent with the idea of a common underlying source. With reference to current models of face recognition, we suggest that these ERP repetition effects for familiar stimuli reflect a change in post-perceptual representations for people, rather than a neural correlate of recognition at a perceptual level.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

Analysis of the memory impairment in a post-encephalitic patient with focal retrograde amnesia.

This study aimed to characterize the qualitative pattern of focal retrograde memory impairment shown by a post-encephalitic patient (AV). AV's memory deficit encompassed autobiographical data, public events and famous people. In a public events questionnaire, she demonstrated a smooth negative temporal gradient with good recollection of events that occurred about 15 years before the disease but poor memory of more recent events. Her visual input lexicon was unimpaired, as demonstrated by normal lexicality judgment for words and normal familiarity judgment for proper names, but she was poor in familiarity judgment for famous faces (prosopagnosia) and in accessing the meaning of words or specific information about people. The cerebral MRI demonstrated widespread abnormal intensity areas encroaching upon the white matter of temporal, parietal and occipital lobes but sparing temporal poles and orbito-frontal cortex.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Neural systems underlying lexical retrieval for sign language.

Positron emission tomography was used to investigate whether signed languages exhibit the same neural organization for lexical retrieval within classical and non-classical language areas as has been described for spoken English. Ten deaf native American sign language (ASL) signers were shown pictures of unique entities (famous persons) and non-unique entities (animals) and were asked to name each stimulus with an overt signed response. Proper name signed responses to famous people were fingerspelled, and common noun responses to animals were both fingerspelled and signed with native ASL signs. In general, retrieving ASL signs activated neural sites similar to those activated by hearing subjects retrieving English words. Naming famous persons activated the left temporal pole (TP), whereas naming animals (whether fingerspelled or signed) activated left inferotemporal (IT) cortex. The retrieval of fingerspelled and native signs generally engaged the same cortical regions, but fingerspelled signs in addition activated a premotor region, perhaps due to the increased motor planning and sequencing demanded by fingerspelling. Native signs activated portions of the left supramarginal gyrus (SMG), an area previously implicated in the retrieval of phonological features of ASL signs. Overall, the findings indicate that similar neuroanatomical areas are involved in lexical retrieval for both signs and words.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

Identification of familiar and unfamiliar faces from internal and external features: some implications for theories of face recognition.

Three experiments are reported in which recognition of faces from whole faces or internal or external features was compared. In the first experiment, where the faces were of famous people, an advantage was found for identification from internal features. In the second experiment involving unfamiliar faces, however, no difference was found in recognition rates when subjects were given the internal or the external features. In a third experiment famous faces were presented and mixed with other famous faces for a recognition test. As in experiment 1, better recognition occurred from internals as compared with external features. It is argued that the internal representation for familiar faces may be qualitatively different from that for face seen just once. In particular some advantage in feature saliency may accrue to the internal or 'expressive' features of familiar faces. The implications of these results are considered in relation to general theories of face perception and recognition.

Discrimination Learning↗
PubMed1987

Birthday and date of death.

The relation between birthday and date of death has so far been studied from two different perspectives: birthdays were either conceived of as emotionally invested deadlines motivating people to ward off their death which causes a 'dip' in death rates before their birthday, or they were considered as stressful events leading to an increase of mortality on or after their birthday. Using a collection of biographies of famous people from the whole world and another of well-known Swiss citizens we tested hypotheses derived from these assumptions. Neither the 'death-dip' hypotheses nor the 'birthday stress' hypothesis was supported by our results.

Anniversaries and Special Events↗
PubMed1995

[A case of predominantly right-temporal lobe atrophy with disturbance of identifying familiar faces].

A right-handed 72-year-old man (I.K.) who complained of difficulty identifying familiar faces was investigated on a series of tests of face perception (face matching, recognition of age and sex, and meaning of facial expressions), facial identity (faces of families and famous persons as retrograde ones and his doctor's faces as anterograde ones) and other neuropsychological abilities. His scores of face perception tests were normal or mildly disturbed. His memory performances measured with WMS-R and Rey-Osterrieth figure were normal. But he could identify none of anterograde and retrograde faces and failed to experience any familiarity with those faces. In addition, he could not recognize none of voices of family members and a doctor, despite of being able to recognize about the age and sex of voice. On the other hand, he could describe personalities of his family members and doctors, but knew none of famous people. Memory for personal events in the recent and remote past was well preserved, while that for social events was severely disturbed in both past. In addition to impairment of identification of familiar faces, he had severe problems with identifying famous common buildings and animals. He also presented Gogi (word meaning) aphasia and impairment of semantic memory for some common objects. Tyrrell et al. reported a similar case and McNeil et al. examined the patient on covert recognition of face in detail. On their task, he showed no covert effects and they attributed the result to impairment of face recognition units themselves. Their way of thinking seems to give an explanation of I.K.'s disturbance of anterograde and retrograde memory for faces.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Aged↗