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At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2002

[The effects of normal aging on face naming and recognition of famous people: battery 75].

The difficulty to recall proper nouns is often something elderly people complain about. Thus, we tried to build and standardize a tool that could allow a quantified estimation of the naming and recognition abilities about famous people faces, specifying the part of gender, age and cultural level for each kind of test. The performances of 542 subjects divided in 3 age brackets and 3 academic knowledge levels were analysed. To carry out the test material, the artistic team of the Grevin Museum (Paris) was called upon. Their work offers a homogeneous way to shape famous people faces. One same person thus photographed 75 characters from different social categories with the same conditions of light, during only one day. The results of the study show that men perform better than women as concerns naming task, but that there's no difference between genders as concerns recognition task. Recognition performances are significantly better whatever the age, the gender and the cultural level may be. Generally, performances are all the more better since subjects are younger and have a higher cultural level. Our study then confirms the fact that normal aging goes hand in hand with rising difficulties to name faces. Moreover, results tend to show that recognition of faces remains better preserved and that the greater disability to recall a name is linked to difficulties in lexical accessing.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2002

Memory for famous people in patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy and excisions.

Memory for famous individuals was assessed by the use of a recognition test in which participants first made familiarity judgments, followed by forced-choice decisions to specific probes for identity. Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) or excisions, 12 left hemisphere and 12 right hemisphere, and 18 control participants identified famous figures across 3 decades (1970s-1990s). Only patients with right TLE were impaired at familiarity judgments of faces; this deficit was evident only for the most recent decades. Both groups of patients, however, were impaired at naming famous faces and at providing semantic information about famous people. These findings suggest the integrity of temporal structures in both hemispheres is critical for retrieval of detailed semantic information about famous individuals.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Famous people and genetic disorders: from monarchs to geniuses--a portrait of their genetic illnesses.

Famous people with genetic disorders have always been a subject of interest because such news feeds the curiosity the public has for celebrities. It gives further insight into their lives and provides a medical basis for any unexplained or idiosyncratic feature or behavior they exhibit. It draws admiration from society of those who excel in their specialized fields despite the impositions of their genetic illnesses and also elicits sympathy even in the most casual observer. Such news certainly catapults a rare genetic disorder into the realm of public awareness. We hereby present six famous figures: King George III, Toulouse-Lautrec, Queen Victoria, Nicolo Paganini, Abraham Lincoln, and Vincent van Gogh, all of whom made a huge indelible mark in either the history of politics or that of the arts.

Art↗
PubMed1999

Great pains: famous people with headaches.

Have headaches influenced the course of history? It is very difficult to prove, but there is no doubt that head pains have affected some of the most influential people in history. This review explores how headaches have affected some of the world's most famous people.

Epilepsy↗
PubMed2002

Is knowledge of famous people disproportionately impaired in patients with early and questionable Alzheimer's disease?

Twenty-two patients with early dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT) and 31 controls were administered tests of person-specific semantics (Experiment 1). DAT patients were impaired on all test components. In Experiment 2, 31 DAT patients, 28 questionable DAT (QDAT) patients, and 42 controls were administered the Graded Naming Test (GNT) and the newly designed Graded Faces Test (GFT), matched for difficulty with the GNT. DAT patients were impaired throughout but showed an advantage for naming objects over faces. The QDAT patients were impaired on the GFT only. Of the 7 QDAT patients who evolved to DAT within 1-2 years, 6 showed initial impairment on the GFT, whereas 17 of the nonconverters scored normally on the GFT. Results suggest greater and earlier vulnerability of person knowledge than general semantic knowledge in DAT.

Aged↗
PubMed2003

Naming and recognizing famous faces in temporal lobe epilepsy.

OBJECTIVE: To assess naming and recognition of faces of familiar famous people in patients with epilepsy before and after anterior temporal lobectomy (ATL). METHODS: Color photographs of famous people were presented for naming and description to 63 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) either before or after ATL and to 10 healthy age- and education-matched controls. RESULTS: Spontaneous naming of photographed famous people was impaired in all patient groups, but was most abnormal in patients who had undergone left ATL. When allowed to demonstrate knowledge of the famous faces through verbal descriptions, rather than naming, patients with left TLE, left ATL, and right TLE improved to normal levels, but patients with right ATL were still impaired, suggesting a new deficit in identifying famous faces. Naming of famous people was related to naming of other common objects, verbal memory, and perceptual discrimination of faces. Recognition of the identity of pictured famous people was more related to visuospatial perception and memory. CONCLUSIONS: Lesions in anterior regions of the right temporal lobe impair recognition of the identities of familiar faces, as well as the learning of new faces. Lesions in the left temporal lobe, especially in anterior regions, disrupt access to the names of known people, but do not affect recognition of the identities of famous faces. Results are consistent with the hypothesized role of lateralized anterior temporal lobe structures in facial recognition and naming of unique entities.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Two tests for assessing remote public knowledge: a tool for assessing retrograde amnesia.

Guidelines for the construction and development of tests of remote memory are provided. These guidelines follow from methodological considerations and from certain theoretical issues we believe that remote memory tests should address if they are to further our understanding of amnesia. These include: the pattern of temporal gradient; memory for different broad classes of information such as famous names and famous events; and recall and recognition of different types of detail such as contextual and non-contextual information associated with remote memory. With respect to the first of these, we argue that it is impossible to fully evaluate competing hypotheses about temporally graded retrograde amnesia unless items are selected from at least two difficulty levels, and from at least two time periods. The construction of two equivalent tests of remote memory, one for famous people, the other for famous events, is described, and the theoretical issues listed earlier were addressed using these tests in a study comparing the remote memory of 13 organic amnesics and 13 age- and IQ-matched controls. The principal findings were as follows. There was only weak evidence that amnesics' remote memory for famous people and events was temporally graded over a 20 year period, and recognition memory and memory for non-contextual detail were equally impaired. Mayes, Meudell, and Pickering's (1985) context memory deficit hypothesis was supported, however, because amnesics were more impaired in their ability to date recognised items. In addition, although there was little support for a temporally graded retrograde impairment on the recognition question, there was much clearer evidence for the temporal dating question. Also, one patient, SR, showed a selective deficit in dating recognised names and events from the 1980s. Finally, the correlations between measures of anterograde and retrograde amnesia were all non-significant. Suitable items for the construction of remote memory tests probing the four decades 1950s to 1980s are presented. A subset of these, from the 1970s and 1980s, were shown to have satisfactory psychometric qualities, and can therefore be recommended for more widespread clinical use, although more extensive normative data than that provided here will be necessary.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Autobiographical amnesia resulting from bilateral paramedian thalamic infarction. A case study in cognitive neurobiology.

A patient with a chronic amnesic state resulting from bilateral paramedian thalamic infarction showed a pattern of retrograde amnesia not previously reported. Personally relevant autobiographical memory was profoundly impaired, whereas knowledge of famous people and public events was relatively spared. Furthermore, knowledge of famous people, including the ability to make accurate temporal judgements, was less affected than knowledge of public events. In addition, we have documented a severe and systematic distortion of personal memory. These findings are not compatible with current accounts of retrograde amnesia based either upon the type of information stored (e.g. episodic versus semantic memory), or upon simple storage versus access models. We propose an explanation based upon an interactive cognitive model in which the patient shows a disorder at the 'thematic retrieval framework' level of memory organization due to a disconnection of frontal and medial temporal memory systems.

Aged↗
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↗
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↗
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↗