Manque du nom propre et effet de la modalité sur la capacité à reconnaître des personnes connues au cours du vieillissement normal

Famous faces naming test predicts conversion from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease

The presence of semantic memory dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease (AD) has been widely investigated. Several studies have showed a higher degree of impairment in naming persons and objects, compared to general semantic knowledge in early stages of AD. The aim of this study was to investigate if the Famous Faces Naming Test can help to differentiate patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) who will progress to AD and those who will not. A Famous Faces Naming Test was administered to 17 patients with MCI who did not convert to AD and eight patients with MCI who converted to AD 2 years later. MCI patients who converted to AD 2 years later performed significantly worse on Famous Faces Naming Test compared to MCI patients who did not convert over that time period. A neuropsychological task of semantic knowledge of famous people may be useful in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

An Analysis of Famous Person Semantic Memory in Aging

BACKGROUND

In contrast to most memory systems that decline with age, semantic memory tends to remain relatively stable across the life span. However, what exactly is stable remains unclear. Is it the quantity of information available or the organization of semantic memory, i.e., the connections between semantic items? Even less is known about semantic memory for celebrities, a subsystem of semantic memory. In the present study, we studied the organization of person-specific semantic memory and its stability in aging.

METHODS

We designed a word association task based on a previous study, which consisted in providing the first word that came to the mind of the participants (15 participants for each age group 20-30, 40-50 and 60-70 years old) for 144 celebrities. We developed a new taxonomy of associated responses as the responses associated with celebrities name could in principle be very varied.

RESULTS

We found that most responses (>90%) could be grouped into five categories (subjective; superordinate general; superordinate specific; imagery and activities). The elderly group did not differ from the other two groups in term of errors or reaction time suggesting they performed the task well. However, they also provided associations that were less precise and less based on imagery. In contrast, the middle-age group provided the most precise associations.

CONCLUSION

These results support the idea of a durable person-specific semantic memory in aging but show changes in the type of associations that elders provide. Future work should aim at studying patients with early semantic impairment, as they could be different from the healthy elders on such semantic association task.

Naming vs knowing faces in primary progressive aphasia: a tale of 2 hemispheres

OBJECTIVES

This study examines the anatomical correlates of naming vs recognizing faces using a novel measure that utilizes culturally relevant and age-appropriate items, the Northwestern University Famous Faces (NUFFACE) Test, in primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a syndrome characterized by progressive language deficits and associated with cortical atrophy in areas important for word and object representations.

METHODS

NUFFACE Test performance of 27 controls (mean age 62.3 years) was compared with that of 30 patients with PPA (mean age 62 years). Associations between NUFFACE Test performance and cortical thickness measures were quantified within the PPA group.

RESULTS

Patients with PPA displayed significant impairment on the NUFFACE Test, demonstrating that it is a useful measure of famous-face identification for individuals with relatively young-onset dementias. Despite widespread distribution of atrophy in the PPA group, face naming impairments were correlated with atrophy of the left anterior temporal lobe while face recognition impairments were correlated with bitemporal atrophy.

CONCLUSIONS

In addition to their clinical relevance for highlighting the distinction between face naming and recognition impairments in individuals with young-onset dementia, these findings add new insights into the dissociable clinico-anatomical substrates of lexical retrieval and object knowledge.