By which name should I call thee? The consequences of having multiple names

The cognitive psychology and neuroscience of naming people

The use of proper names enables us to designate entities, including people, at a very specific level of categorization: the unique entity or the individual. The paper presents a general overview of psychological/cognitive and neuroscientific studies that have compared the production of proper names, in particular people's names, with the production of common nouns during the last thirty years. The search for specific brain correlates of proper naming included single-case and group studies of patients with brain lesions, and studies utilizing functional neuroimaging or brain electrical stimulation with healthy participants. These studies have led neuroscientists to hypothesize that the recall of proper names involves a rather complex network including mainly left frontal and temporal regions. Behavioural evidence supports the view that proper names are more difficult to recall than common names, and scientists have proposed different explanations for this relative difficulty. Finally, several new directions for future research are proposed to improve our understanding of both cognitive processes and their brain correlates involved during proper name recall.

Drawing a distinction between familiar and unfamiliar voice processing: A review of neuropsychological, clinical and empirical findings

Thirty years on from their initial observation that familiar voice recognition is not the same as unfamiliar voice discrimination (van Lancker and Kreiman, 1987), the current paper reviews available evidence in support of a distinction between familiar and unfamiliar voice processing. Here, an extensive review of the literature is provided, drawing on evidence from four domains of interest: the neuropsychological study of healthy individuals, neuropsychological investigation of brain-damaged individuals, the exploration of voice recognition deficits in less commonly studied clinical conditions, and finally empirical data from healthy individuals. All evidence is assessed in terms of its contribution to the question of interest - is familiar voice processing distinct from unfamiliar voice processing. In this regard, the evidence provides compelling support for van Lancker and Kreiman's early observation. Two considerations result: First, the limits of research based on one or other type of voice stimulus are more clearly appreciated. Second, given the demonstration of a distinction between unfamiliar and familiar voice processing, a new wave of research is encouraged which examines the transition involved as a voice is learned.

Competitors or Teammates

Research has documented that proper names are more difficult to learn and remember than other types of words. Various causes of this difficulty have been proposed to better understand how proper names are represented in memory and the degree to which names compete with each other. In the retrieval of names, some studies show competition, whereas other studies find facilitation. During comprehension, names demonstrate competition by causing a Moses illusion: People erroneously answer invalid questions such as “How many animals did Moses take on the ark?”, failing to detect that Noah is the correct name for the question. Errors in both name retrieval and comprehension are more likely when the correct name and distractor name sound similar, share biographical characteristics, or have some visual resemblance. However, shared visual information has played a competitive role more consistently in name comprehension than retrieval, an asymmetry that remains to be investigated.

Searching for interference effects in learning new face-name associations

In three experiments we attempted to increase interference using experimental manipulations in a face-name learning paradigm. All experiments included young and older adult participants because ageing is associated with increases in both susceptibility to interference and difficulty in learning face-name associations. None of the experiments produced interference for either age group: The inclusion of confusable (i.e., ambiguous) names and occupations, having to learn an additional piece of information in association with each face, and requiring participants to guess when uncertain all failed to negatively impact name learning. Interference does not appear to be the critical mechanism underlying the difficulty of learning proper names, and it cannot account for older adults' disproportionate decline in name-learning ability.

Partial knowledge in a tip-of-the-tongue state about two- and three-word proper names

Participants in this study attempted to name 44 famous people i n response to reading biographical information about them. Half of the celebrities had names that contained two words (e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow and Sean Penn), and half of them had names containing three words (e.g., Catherine Zeta Jones and Billy Bob Thornton). Half of the names had previously been judged to be of high familiarity (e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow), and half were of lower familiarity (e.g., Billy Bob Thornton). The results showed that when in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state, the participants were able to estimate at above-chance rates whether a celebrity's name comprised two or three words. Accurate information about the number of words was not available to the participants unless they were in a TOT state or had already named the person. Attempts to identify celebrities whose name had three elements were associated with an increased number of TOTs, relative to celebrities whose name had two units, but there was no difference in the number of don't know responses for names containing two or three words. Calculations based on Gollan and Brown (2006) suggested that having three names impaired the phonological but not the semantic stage of lexical retrieval, whereas low familiarity impaired both semantic and phonological retrieval stages.