Why are names of people associated with so many phonological retrieval failures?

"I don't know who you are": anomia for people's names in Alzheimer's disease

It is well known that difficulty in the retrieval of people's names is an early symptom of Alzheimer's Disease Dementia (ADD), but there is a controversy about the nature of this deficit. In this study, we analyzed whether the nature of the difficulty in retrieving proper names in ADD reflects pre-semantic, semantic, or post-semantic difficulties. To do so, 85 older adults, 35 with ADD and 50 cognitively healthy (CH), completed a task with famous faces involving: recognition, naming, semantic questions, and naming with phonological cues. The ADD group scored lower than the CH group in all tasks. Both groups showed a greater capacity for recognition than naming, but this difference was more pronounced in the ADD group. Additionally, the ADD group showed significantly fewer semantic errors than the CH group. Overall results suggest that the difficulties people with ADD have in naming reflect a degradation at semantic level.

Dorsal White Matter Integrity and Name Retrieval in Midlife

Abstract:

Background: Recent findings on retrieval of proper names in cognitively healthy middle-aged persons indicate that Tip-Of-The-Tongue (TOT) states occurring during proper name retrieval implicate inferior frontal (BA 44) and parietal (BA 40) cortical areas. Such findings give rise to the possibility that anatomical connectivity via dorsal white matter may be associated with difficulties in name retrieval in midlife.

Objectives & Method:

Using Diffusion Tensor Imaging, we examined in vivo microstructural properties of white matter in 72 cognitively healthy Middle-Aged (MA) and 59 Young Adults (YA), comparing their naming abilities as well as testing, for possible associations between dorsal white matter integrity and naming abilities in the MA group.

Results:

The MA group was better in retrieving correct names (U = 1525.5, p = .006), but they also retrieved more incorrect names than YA believing they had retrieved the correct ones (U = 1265.5, p < .001). Furthermore, despite being more familiar with the tested names than YA (U = 930, p < .001), MA experienced significantly more TOTs relative to YA (U = 1498.5, p = .004). Tract-based spatial statistics showed significant group differences in values of fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity, axial diffusivity, radial diffusivity, and mode of anisotropy in a range of white matter tracts. In the MA group, FA values in the right Superior Longitudinal Fasciculus (SLF) were positively correlated with “don’t know” scores (rs = .287, p = .014).

Conclusion:

The association of SLF integrity and name retrieval ability in midlife indicates a need to revisit the models of name retrieval that posit no role for dorsal white matter in proper name retrieval.

Aging Effects on Phonological and Semantic Priming in the Tip-of-the-Tongue: Evidence From a Two-Step Approach

The mechanism underlying the age difference in spoken word production remains controversial. We used a two-step approach proposed by Gollan and Brown (2006) to investigate the semantic and phonological retrieval deficits when tip-of-the-tongue occurs in young and older adults. Importantly, we controlled the inhibition ability in both older and young groups. In experiment 1 with a people pictures naming task, older adults produced more TOTs than young adults, and they suffered from phonological retrieval deficit rather than semantic retrieval deficit in speaking. In experiment 2 with a priming paradigm, participants were presented semantically related or phonologically related names before target pictures, which formed semantic or phonological priming conditions for lexical access. Compared with young adults, older adults showed a greater effect of phonological priming on decreasing TOTs occurrence. For semantic retrieval deficit, older adults exhibited a smaller phonological facilitation effect and a larger semantic interference effect than young adults. For phonological retrieval deficit, older adults presented a larger phonological facilitation effect in the first-name related priming condition than the first-syllable related priming condition, whereas young adults showed similar facilitation effects between the two phonological priming conditions. Our findings provide consistent evidence for the transmission deficit hypothesis, and highlight that aging affects bidirectional connections between semantic and phonological nodes in speech production.

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.

Demographic factors and retrieval of object and proper names after age 70

Purpose

This research aimed to investigate whether demographic factors are similarly related to retrieval of object and proper names.

Methods

The sample included 5,907 individuals above age 70 who participated in the Health and Retirement Study between 2004 and 2012. Participants were asked to name two objects as well as the US President and Vice President. Latent growth curve models examined the associations of age, education, and self-rated health with baseline levels and change trajectories in retrieval.

Results

Age and education were more strongly related to retrieval of proper names than to retrieval of object names, both for baseline scores and for change trajectory. Similar effects of self-rated health emerged for both types of stimuli.

Conclusions

The results show that examining object names and proper names together as indication of cognitive status in the HRS might overlook important differences between the two types of stimuli, in both baseline performance and longitudinal change.

Proper name retrieval and structural integrity of cerebral cortex in midlife: A cross-sectional study

There is currently little understanding on whether retrieval of proper names differs in midlife compared to young adulthood and if so, whether the age differences in this ability are associated with differences in structural integrity of the cerebral cortex. To answer these questions, we studied retrieval of proper names in 115 cognitively healthy middle-aged persons (49.7, ±3.2), comparing their performance on a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) task with that of 68 young persons (25.4, ±3.5) from the Cam-Can data repository (http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/datasets/camcan/). Grey matter (GM) density and cortical thickness were used as indices of structural integrity of the cerebral cortex. The middle-aged (MA) group experienced more TOTs during proper names retrieval than young adults (YA), (t = 3.789, p < .005) and had considerably less GM density and cortical thickness across a range of brain areas bilaterally. Small clusters in left BA 45 and right BA 44 (cortical thickness) and in right BA 40 (volumetry) revealed group differences when accounting for TOTs. However, we observed no correlations between MA's TOT scores and GM volumes or cortical thickness of the brain regions typically reported as implicated in retrieval of proper names: left anterior temporal lobe, left insula, and left superior and middle temporal gyri.

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.

Electro-cortical manifestations of common vs. proper name processing during reading

The main purpose of the present study was to investigate how proper and common nouns are represented in the brain independent of memory retrieval processes. Participants were instructed to perform a lexical decision task while dense-array EEG was continuously recorded. Both ERP components (namely N400 and P300) and swLORETA suggested that proper name processing engaged a more widespread neural network and required more cognitive resources than common noun processing. Overall, our results come down in favor of the hypothesis that specific effects of proper vs. common noun processing exist, and they suggest a possible neuro-functional segregation of proper vs. common noun processing. The difference in proper and common noun processing seems to emerge at the level of storage or representation of lexical knowledge, and it may crucially depend on their semantic characteristics.