Is naming faces different from naming objects? Semantic interference in a face- and object-naming task

Competition accumulates in successive retrieval of proper names

Proper names are especially prone to retrieval failures and tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs)-a phenomenon wherein a person has a strong feeling of knowing a word but cannot retrieve it. Current research provides mixed evidence regarding whether related names facilitate or compete with target-name retrieval. We examined this question in two experiments using a novel paradigm where participants either read a prime name aloud (Experiment 1) or classified a written prime name as famous or non-famous (Experiment 2) prior to naming a celebrity picture. Successful retrievals decreased with increasing trial number (and was dependent on the number of previously presented similar famous people) in both experiments, revealing a form of accumulating interference between multiple famous names. However, trial number had no effect on TOTs, and within each trial famous prime names increased TOTs only in Experiment 2. These results can be explained within a framework that assumes competition for selection at the point of lexical retrieval, such that successful retrievals decrease after successive retrievals of proper names of depicted faces of semantically similar people. By contrast, the effects of written prime words only occur when prime names are sufficiently processed, and do not provide evidence for competition but may reflect improved retrieval relative to a "don't know" response.

Norms for pictures of proper names: contrasting famous people and well-known places in younger and older adults

Proper names comprise a class of labels that arbitrarily nominate specific entities, such as people and places. Compared to common nouns, retrieving proper names is more challenging. Thus, they constitute good alternative semantic categories for psycholinguistic and neurocognitive research and intervention. The ability to retrieve proper names is known to decrease with aging. Likewise, their retrieval may differ across their different categories (e.g., people and places) given their specific associated knowledge. Therefore, proper names' stimuli require careful selection due to their high dependence on prior experiences. Notably, normative datasets for pictures of proper names are scarce and hardly have considered the influence of aging and categories. The current study established culturally adapted norms for proper names' pictures (N = 80) from an adult sample (N = 107), in psycholinguistic measures (naming and categorization scores) and evaluative dimensions (fame, familiarity, distinctiveness, arousal, and representational quality). These norms were contrasted across different categories (famous people and well-known places) and age groups (younger and older adults). Additionally, the correlations between all variables were examined. Proper names' pictures were named and categorized above chance and overall rated as familiar, famous, distinctive, and of high representational quality. Age effects were observed across all variables, except familiarity. Category effects were occasionally observed. Finally, the correlations between the psycholinguistic measures and all rated dimensions suggest the relevance of controlling for these dimensions when assessing naming abilities. The current norms provide a relevant aging-adapted dataset that is publicly available for research and intervention purposes.

A normative study for photographs of celebrities in Spain

Research on familiar faces has recurrently been conducted in different domains, such as, psycholinguistics, memory, attention, face processing, aging studies, etc. In general, photographs of celebrities, their proper names, or their occupations have been the materials mainly employed in those types of studies. These stimuli are, however, very constrained by the geographic and sociocultural contexts in which the studies are conducted, and, in spite of their relevance for psychological research, there are no normative studies for celebrities in Spain. With the aim of filling this gap, the photographs and names of the 118 most frequently produced celebrities in Spain were collected. For each celebrity, values for 13 different indices (including psycholinguistic properties, naming times, and emotional indicators) were obtained from a young adult Spanish sample. Regression analyses on the data indicated that the main determinant in naming times and ToTs was the percentage of correct responses. Face agreement was also a significant predictor of ToTs. Results were compared with previous celebrity norms in other languages, and discussed in relation to the current models of face processing. These norms are likely to make a useful contribution to the design of more controlled research and applied tools in Psychology.

The modulating effect of education on semantic interference during healthy aging

Aging has traditionally been related to impairments in name retrieval. These impairments have usually been explained by a phonological transmission deficit hypothesis or by an inhibitory deficit hypothesis. This decline can, however, be modulated by the educational level of the sample. This study analyzed the possible role of these approaches in explaining both object and face naming impairments during aging. Older adults with low and high educational level and young adults with high educational level were asked to repeatedly name objects or famous people using the semantic-blocking paradigm. We compared naming when exemplars were presented in a semantically homogeneous or in a semantically heterogeneous context. Results revealed significantly slower rates of both face and object naming in the homogeneous context (i.e., semantic interference), with a stronger effect for face naming. Interestingly, the group of older adults with a lower educational level showed an increased semantic interference effect during face naming. These findings suggest the joint work of the two mechanisms proposed to explain age-related naming difficulties, i.e., the inhibitory deficit and the transmission deficit hypothesis. Therefore, the stronger vulnerability to semantic interference in the lower educated older adult sample would possibly point to a failure in the inhibitory mechanisms in charge of interference resolution, as proposed by the inhibitory deficit hypothesis. In addition, the fact that this interference effect was mainly restricted to face naming and not to object naming would be consistent with the increased age-related difficulties during proper name retrieval, as suggested by the transmission deficit hypothesis.

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.

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.

The Role of Task-Specific Response Strategies in Blocked-Cyclic Naming

In word retrieval, speakers need to select a lexical entry among several co-activated candidates for lexicalization. How a target entry is selected is a matter of ongoing debate. Semantic context effects on naming times, as seen in the blocked-cyclic naming paradigm, are of specific interest to this debate. In the standard version of this paradigm, participants name lists of objects compiled from several repetitions (cycles) of a small set of semantically related objects (homogeneous context) or unrelated objects (heterogeneous context). In the first cycle, participants typically show either no context effect or semantic facilitation. From cycle two onward, they display a stable semantic interference effect that does not increase over cycles. In this review, I demonstrate that the early semantic facilitation effect is only observed consistently in studies that present homogeneous and heterogeneous lists in a blocked fashion. With this design, participants can easily pick up on the categorical relatedness of the items in semantically related contexts and apply this knowledge strategically. In principle, such response strategies can be easily tied in with existing models of lexical selection, but they are incompatible with accounts of semantic context effects that take the semantic facilitation effect in cycle 1 to be a consequence of processes inherent to the lexicalization process. Users of the blocked-cyclic naming paradigm should review their experimental designs carefully regarding potential response strategies. Once these are taken into account, the paradigm can be used to study lexical-semantic encoding in different populations of healthy and also impaired speakers.

Face naming and retrieval inhibition in old and very old age

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: Aging has traditionally been related to impairments in proper name retrieval. This study analyzed the possible role of the Inhibitory Deficit Hypothesis in explaining face naming impairments during aging. The dynamics of inhibition have been thoroughly studied by the retrieval-practice paradigm (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 1063-1087) and its aftereffect, the retrieval-induced forgetting effect.

METHODS

A version of the retrieval-practice paradigm was employed: younger-old (YO; mean age = 66.40, SD = 3.94) and older-old (OO; mean age = 80.94, SD = 4.53) adults were asked to repeatedly name faces of categorically related famous people.

RESULTS

Retrieval-induced forgetting for names was observed in the YO group but not in the OO group.

CONCLUSION

These findings indicate that whereas the YO adults had enough resources to inhibit intrusive names, OO adults were not able to suppress competing names, supporting the proposal of the Inhibitory Deficit Hypothesis at older ages.

Interference resolution in face perception and name retrieval

Selective retrieval is a rather difficult task, and especially so when one attempts to retrieve personal representations such as faces or names. Retrieval of memories under strong competition conditions is pervasive in human memory and some have suggested that inhibitory control is used to overcome interference between competing stimuli. In the present study, we used the retrieval practice paradigm to investigate if competition among personal representations (such as facial features and names) is also resolved by inhibitory mechanisms. This question is theoretically relevant, since personal representations have been said to have a special status on cognition. Moreover, some models of face recognition assume that interference can arise between different representations, but that this interference would be automatically and rapidly solved, with no need for a controlled inhibitory mechanism to act. In two experiments we showed RIF for facial features and familiar names, but only when participants had to actively retrieve some information. This suggests that personal information is subject to mechanisms of inhibitory control, which could help explain everyday life difficulties in processes such as face feature recognition or name retrieval.