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I recognize your face, but I can't remember your name: a question of expertise?

In four experiments on the identification of familiar faces we reassessed a robust performance pattern--namely, the temporal advantage for retrieving biographical facts as compared to recalling proper names, which has been interpreted as reflecting a serial ordering of the access to semantic and name information. Evidence for recent parallel accounts had been provided by Scanlan and Johnston (1997) who reported an advantage for name retrieval in children. Here we replicated the findings of Scanlan and Johnston but also showed that the naming advantage disappears, and performance is very similar to that of adults when stimuli and tasks are used that are familiar to children. Conversely, we also demonstrated an advantage for name retrieval in adults when highly unfamiliar semantic facts were associated with the faces. Together these findings suggest that there is no fundamental difference in the cognitive architectures of children and adults. The experiments indicate that the relative speed of naming and semantic fact retrieval depends on the expertise with the semantic facts to be retrieved. Implications for models of face identification and naming are discussed.

Adult↗

Memory for proper names in old age: a disproportionate impairment?

A common complaint of older adults is that they have trouble remembering names, even the names of people they know well. Two experiments examining this problem are reported in the present article. Experiment I tested episodic memory for surnames and occupations; older adults and younger adults under divided attention performed less well than did full attention younger adults, but showed no disproportionate loss of name information. Experiment 2 examined the ability to name photographs of public figures and of uncommon objects; this experiment therefore tested retrieval from semantic memory. In this case adults in their 70s did show an impairment in recall of names of known people, but not of known objects. Further analyses revealed systematic relations between naming, recognition, and rated familiarity of the categories used. Familiarity largely determined the proportions of recognizable items that were named in a prior phase. Overall, little evidence was found for a disproportionate age-related impairment in naming in either episodic or semantic memory.

Adult↗

I recognize your face, but I can't remember your name: a grown-up explanation?

Contemporary models of face recognition explain everyday difficulties in name retrieval by proposing that name information can only be accessed after semantic information (e.g. Bruce & Young, 1986) or by proposing an architecture which puts name retrieval at a disadvantage (e.g. Burton & Bruce, 1992). Experiments reported here examined the time required to access name and semantic details by adult and child subjects. In Experiment 1 adult subjects took more time to match familiar faces to names than to other semantic details (e.g. occupation), a finding consistent with all the previous literature on name retrieval. Experiment 2, however, showed that the youngest subjects were significantly faster in matching familiar faces to names than to semantic details. Experiment 3 also showed that children were faster at accessing names than occupations when giving vocal responses to presentations of familiar faces. These findings are not predicted by rigidly sequential models of face recognition and are discussed with specific reference to the ontogenesis of models based on a more flexible connectionist architecture.

Adolescent↗

The improved name game: better use of expanding retrieval practice.

Morris and Fritz (2000) demonstrated the effectiveness of the name game as a retrieval-practice based technique for learning the names of group members. We hypothesised that a reversed version of the name game would be even more effective. Performance was contrasted with a no-retrieval condition that mimicked the name game in every way except for the retrieval of the names, allowing an estimate of the specific contribution of retrieval practice. The benefit of a few refresher rounds of the game after 2 weeks was also examined. The reversed name game was superior to the original name game and the refresher rounds benefited all groups. The very considerable superiority of the name game over the no-retrieval condition demonstrated the magnitude of the benefit of expanding retrieval practice.

Adult↗

Access to visual information from a name is contingent on access to identity-specific semantic information.

In this study, we investigated subjects' ability to retrieve information about a familiar person's facial appearance in response to seeing their name. Each famous name was associated with one of four occupations (sport, music, politics, and acting) and one of four distinctive facial features (beard, long hair, glasses, baldness). Subjects were asked to state which occupation, and which facial feature was associated with each name. The most important finding was that subjects were generally only able to recall the distinctive facial feature that a person possessed if they were also able to recall their occupation. Recall of the person's occupation, by contrast, was not contingent on remembering the person's facial appearance. These results suggest that there are no direct links between the representation of a person's name in memory and visual information about their facial appearance. The link appears to be indirect, and to be mediated by non-visual semantic information about the person, such as their occupation. This conclusion was also supported by an examination of the effects of biographical cues on subjects' ability to recall facial information that they had previously failed to recall. In a second experiment, subjects were presented with biographical details about famous people, and were asked to retrieve information about their face and name. Retrieval of facial information did not appear to be contingent on recall of the name, nor did recall of the name appear to be contingent on retrieval of facial information. On the basis of the results, an hierarchical model of name recognition is presented which is analogous to current models of face recognition (e.g. Bruce & Young, 1986).

Adult↗

Rehabilitation of memory for people's names.

In a training study, memory-impaired patients were taught strategies to improve the learning of new names and the retrieval of familiar people's names. To improve new name learning, the patients were encouraged to give more meaning to a person's name, without requiring an explicit association between the face and the name. Strategies to improve retrieval of familiar names mainly concerned ways to resolve tip-of-the-tongue states. Learning names to faces improved following training on one of the two target tests and this improvement was maintained six months following training. Retrieval of familiar people's names also improved immediately following the training, although the improvement disappeared at the six-month follow-up. Two control memory tests and a group of normal subjects, who received no training, were used to discriminate an effect of training from the effects of repeated testing and the extensive attention received by the trained group.

Adult↗

Name and face learning in older adults: effects of level of processing, self-generation, and intention to learn.

Many older adults are interested in strategies to help them learn new names. We examined the learning conditions that provide maximal benefit to name and face learning. In Experiment 1, consistent with levels-of-processing theory, name recall and recognition by 20 younger and 20 older adults was poorest with physical processing, intermediate with phonemic processing, and best with semantic processing. In Experiment 2, name and face learning in 20 younger and 20 older adults was maximized with semantic processing of names and physical processing of faces. Experiment 3 showed a benefit of self-generation and of intentional learning of name-face pairs in 24 older adults. Findings suggest that memory interventions should emphasize processing names semantically, processing faces physically, self-generating this information, and keeping in mind that memory for the names will be needed in the future.

Adult↗

Cherry pit primes Brad Pitt: Homophone priming effects on young and older adults' production of proper names.

This study investigated why proper names are difficult to retrieve, especially for older adults. On intermixed trials, young and older adults produced a word for a definition or a proper name for a picture of a famous person. Prior production of a homophone (e.g., pit) as the response on a definition trial increased correct naming and reduced tip-of-the-tongue experiences for a proper name (e.g., Pitt) on a picture-naming trial. Among participants with no awareness of the homophone manipulation, older but not young adults showed these homophone priming effects. With a procedure that reduced awareness effects (Experiment 2), prior production of a homophone improved correct naming only for older adults, but speeded naming latency for both age groups. We suggest that representations of proper names are susceptible to weak connections that cause deficits in the transmission of excitation, impairing retrieval especially in older adults. We conclude that homophone production strengthens phonological connections, increasing the transmission of excitation.

Adult↗

Building a protein name dictionary from full text: a machine learning term extraction approach.

BACKGROUND: The majority of information in the biological literature resides in full text articles, instead of abstracts. Yet, abstracts remain the focus of many publicly available literature data mining tools. Most literature mining tools rely on pre-existing lexicons of biological names, often extracted from curated gene or protein databases. This is a limitation, because such databases have low coverage of the many name variants which are used to refer to biological entities in the literature. RESULTS: We present an approach to recognize named entities in full text. The approach collects high frequency terms in an article, and uses support vector machines (SVM) to identify biological entity names. It is also computationally efficient and robust to noise commonly found in full text material. We use the method to create a protein name dictionary from a set of 80,528 full text articles. Only 8.3% of the names in this dictionary match SwissProt description lines. We assess the quality of the dictionary by studying its protein name recognition performance in full text. CONCLUSION: This dictionary term lookup method compares favourably to other published methods, supporting the significance of our direct extraction approach. The method is strong in recognizing name variants not found in SwissProt.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

Cues to referent gender in randomly constructed names.

50 volunteers' assignments of gender to 32 randomly constructed names confirmed previous findings with respect to the structure of actual names (men's names are shorter, women's names tend to end in vowels, especially the schwa vowel) and with respect to the emotionality of sounds in actual names (men's names sound more Active, Nasty, and Unpleasant; women's names sound softer). Assignment of sex to random names was predictable (R>.8) on the basis of combinations of these variables.

Adult↗

Three last letters identify most female first names.

The last spelled letter often indicates the sex of first names. Most female names end with the last letter a, e, or i. Female names are distinctive and therefore easy to identify because of the small number of predominantly female endings. Most male names end with one of 19 last letters. Two last letters, h and y, occur with similar frequency for both sexes. The cultural tradition of higher status for men contributes to the avoidance of predominantly female last letters for male names. A female name with a predominantly male last letter therefore occurs more often than a male name with a predominantly female last letter. The findings were obtained from the 500 most frequent first names given to males and females in Pennsylvania in 1990.

Birth Certificates↗

Cross-modality priming for people's adjectivized names: failure to support the adjectivization hypothesis.

This experiment tested a prediction derived from Hollis and Valentine's 2001 adjectivization hypothesis, that having an adjectival form is the key factor that makes certain classes of proper names, i.e., country names, exhibit a common name-like pattern of long-term priming. The hypothesis predicted that, when adjectivized historical celebrity names, e.g., William Shakespeare/Shakespearean, were compared with nonadjectivized historical celebrity names, e.g., Emile Zola, cross-modality long-term priming in a familiarity decision task would occur only for nonadjectivized name stimuli. 32 students of literature, history, or philosophy (21 women and 11 men; age range 18-41 years, M age = 22.4 yr.) were tested. Priming was measured by latency of response. Analysis showed that the mean RT to primed items was faster than the mean RT to unprimed items when the prime task was presented in both visual and auditory modalities both for the adjectivized and nonadjectivized names. Contrary to the hypothesis, cross-modality priming was observed regardless of the adjectivization of name stimuli. The findings of the present experiment did not support the adjectivization hypothesis.

Adolescent↗

A successful technique for removing names in pathology reports using an augmented search and replace method.

The ability to access large amounts of de-identified clinical data would facilitate epidemiologic and retrospective research. Previously described de-identification methods require knowledge of natural language processing or have not been made available to the public. We take advantage of the fact that the vast majority of proper names in pathology reports occur in pairs. In rare cases where one proper name is by itself, it is preceded or followed by an affix that identifies it as a proper name (Mrs., Dr., PhD). We created a tool based on this observation using substitution methods that was easy to implement and was largely based on publicly available data sources. We compiled a Clinical and Common Usage Word (CCUW) list as well as a fairly comprehensive proper name list. Despite the large overlap between these two lists, we were able to refine our methods to achieve accuracy similar to previous attempts at de-identification. Our method found 98.7% of 231 proper names in the narrative sections of pathology reports. Three single proper names were missed out of 1001 pathology reports (0.3%, no first name/last name pairs). It is unlikely that identification could be implied from this information. We will continue to refine our methods, specifically working to improve the quality of our CCUW and proper name lists to obtain higher levels of accuracy.

Algorithms↗

Effects of face and name presentation on memory for associated verbal descriptors.

Sixty-four participants were tested on immediate and delayed recall of verbal information about people accompanied by photographs of them, in comparison to verbal information about people accompanied by written names of them. Forty-two descriptive sentences were shown in a fixed random order, each associated with a photograph of one of 6 people (7 facts per depicted person), and another 42 sentences were paired with the written name of one of 6 people (7 facts per named person). Participants had to recall as many facts about each face or name as they could, 5 min after the presentation and then a week later. More information was recalled when paired with a photographic image than when paired with a name, especially in the delayed recall condition. Facts referring to a certain face or name were not attributed to a different face or name. Females excelled males on both short- and long-term retention of information. Face-related performance improved significantly when participants became aware of the precise design and memory demands of the task, but name-related performance did not improve.

Adult↗

Variables influencing memory over long periods of time for recently learned face-name pairs.

The ability to match faces with corresponding names was studied under various conditions involving encoding and retrieval. Twenty photographs of undergraduates were randomly paired with 20 common names. Experiment 1 presented the photographs for 10 s each, followed by either presentation of the names alone with the instruction to write face characteristics from memory or presentation of the photographs again with instructions to write from memory the names and anything unusual about the names themselves. Later retrieval was best for the former condition and was interpreted as showing that names could prime image representations of faces. Experiment 2 was a partial replication of Experiment 1 with retrieval measured over 7 weeks. These results showed that memories for face-name matches lasted several weeks. Also, consistent with Experiment 1, the number of reported initial face characteristics was highly predictive of matches between faces and names. These studies show the importance for later retrieval of forming and maintaining vivid images of faces even when the faces have no outstanding characteristics.

Adult↗

Comparison of simultaneous administration of lithium with L-NAME or L-arginine on morphine withdrawal syndrome in mice.

Due to the claim that chronic administration of lithium or L-N(G)-nitroarginine methyl ester (L-NAME), a nitric oxide synthase (NOS) inhibitor reduces morphine withdrawal syndrome, the effects of chronic administration of lithium, L-NAME, or L-arginine (L-Arg), a precursor of NO, alone or co-administration of lithium with L-Arg or L-NAME, on naloxone-precipitated withdrawal syndrome and physical dependence development to morphine in mice chronically treated with morphine, were evaluated. Morphine dependency was induced by the intraperitoneal injection (i.p.) of morphine (10 mg/kg), once daily for 7 days. Physical dependence to morphine was observed by precipitating an abstinence syndrome with naloxone (2 mg/kg, i.p.). Chronic administration of L-NAME (10 mg/kg, i.p., once daily, for 7 days after 10 days of receiving only tap water and food prior to naloxone), decreased all withdrawal signs significantly, while L-Arg (200 mg/kg, as above) increased only some withdrawal signs significantly in morphine-dependent mice. Chronic administration of lithium (600 mg/kg, in drinking water) alone or co-administration of lithium (as above) with L-NAME (10 mg/kg) or L-Arg (200 mg/kg, i.p., once daily) for 7 days after 10 days of receiving only lithium (as above) and food, decreased all withdrawal signs and physical dependence significantly in morphine-dependent mice. The results obtained indicate that co-administration of L-NAME with lithium increases the effect of lithium or L-NAME alone, on withdrawal signs, but this increase is not significantly different as compared to chronic lithium or L-NAME administration alone; while co-administration of L-Arg with lithium decreases the effects of lithium on withdrawal signs and this decrease is not significant as compared to chronic lithium administration alone. These findings indicate that nitric oxide may be involved in modulation of naloxone-induced withdrawal syndrome, and treatment with lithium could have some effect on this system. Copyright 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Journal Article↗

Deterioration of naming nouns versus verbs in primary progressive aphasia.

Disproportionate impairment of naming nouns versus verbs and the opposite pattern have been reported in cases of focal brain damage or degenerative disease, indicating that processing of nouns and verbs may rely on different brain regions. However, it has not been clear whether it is the spoken word forms or the meanings (or both) of nouns and verbs that depend on separate neural regions. We tested oral and written naming of nouns and verbs, matched in difficulty, in patients with nonfluent primary progressive aphasia (nonfluent PPA; n = 15), fluent primary progressive aphasia (fluent PPA; n = 7), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis with frontotemporal dementia (ALS-FTD; n = 6). Patients with nonfluent PPA and ALS-FTD, both individually and as groups, were significantly more impaired on verb naming than on noun naming and significantly more impaired on oral naming than written naming. Patients with fluent PPA showed the opposite pattern for both word class and modality, significantly more impaired naming of nouns versus verbs and significantly more impaired written versus oral naming. Results indicate that separate regions of the brain are essential for access to oral and written word forms of verbs and nouns, and that these neural regions can be differentially damaged in separate forms of PPA.

Aged↗

Picture naming in young children: a developmental study on interhemispheric collaboration.

The aim of the present study was to determine how interhemispheric collaboration and visual attention in basic lexical tasks develop during early childhood. Two- to 6-year-old children were asked to name two different pictures presented simultaneously either one in each visual hemifield (bilateral condition) or both in a single hemifield (either right or left, unilateral condition). In the bilateral condition, children were overall more accurate in naming right visual field than left visual field pictures. This difference was significant for 2- and 3- to 4-year-old children, but not for 5- to 6-year-old children. These results show that the right and left cerebral hemispheres do not develop naming competencies equally well in early childhood. A second analysis, based on the order of report, showed that when 2- and 3- to 4-year-old children named both the left and the right visual field pictures, they named the right visual field picture first. In contrast, at the age of 5-6 years, children named the left visual field picture first and overall naming performance reached a ceiling level. Several interpretations are proposed to explain this shift of visual attention at the age of 5-6 years. In the unilateral condition, no difference was found between naming accuracy in the right and left visual fields, presumably because interhemispheric pathways are functional: visual stimuli presented to the right hemisphere can be processed by the most competent left hemisphere without degradation of information. This result confirms previous findings on the development of interhemispheric collaboration.

Child↗