Daily‐life difficulties in person recognition reported by young and elderly subjects

Abstract

Elderly people frequently complain spontaneously about their inability to remember people and their names. Naturalistic methods such as diaries, checklists, etc. provide useful means to study and make more explicit the nature of such memory difficulties among the elderly, as well as to better understand normal memory functioning. We developed a checklist (inspired by a study by Young, Hay and Ellis, 1985) to explore normal young and elderly people's difficulties in person recognition. The checklist is composed of four parts, each one corresponding to a particular context in which the difficulty took place. Each part has the same structure and consists of precise questions about the type of incident, the circumstances, the persons involved, and the way the incident ended. Three groups of normal subjects kept records of their difficulties and errors in recognizing people for 1 month: young subjects with a bad memory for faces, young subjects without particular problems of face memory, and a group of elderly subjects. A total of 299 records were collected. They were classified with respect to the functional components presumably implied in the process breakdown. The elderly subjects experienced difficulties with retrieving names, first names, or nicknames (Name Codes), while the young subjects with a bad memory for faces reported overall the greatest number of incidents and were particularly impaired in access to Face Recognition Units. A characterization of these two kinds of difficulties is proposed. Young subjects without problems of face memory presented equal numbers of difficulties at all stages of person recognition. These patterns of results will be discussed in terms of current cognitive models of person recognition.The collection and analysis of difficulties and errors in person recognition has been the aim of both naturalistic and laboratory studies (for instance, Brennen, Baguley, Bright, and Bruce, 1990;Bruce, 1988;Bruce, Ellis, Gibling, and Young, 1987;Hanley and Cowell, 1988;Hay and Young, 1982;Young, McWeeny, Hay, and Ellis, 1986;Young, Hay and Ellis, 1985). The study of memory difficulties in everyday life may well improve our understanding of normal memory functioning. The results of such investigation have been used to test or refine models of the cognitive operations involved in face recognition or, more broadly, in person recognition. For instance, the records collected by Young et al. (1985) using a diary method are often presented as an important data source supporting the arrangement of functional components postulated by the models of Young (1982), or Bruce and: these studies have confirmed the different stages of face processing, and showed 0888-4080/92/020 16 1-1 2$06.00 0 1992

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