Retrieving Familiar People's Names in Patients with Severe Closed-Head Injuries

Abstract

Patients with closed-head injury frequently complain about difficulties with retrieving the names of familiar people, but very few studies have investigated these complaints by objective measurements. Three experiments are reported that compared personal name retrieval in patients with severe closed-head injuries and normal controls. The patients more frequently failed to produce the names of famous persons, and had longer naming latencies than the controls. Accuracy of recognizing familiar persons was normal in the patients, even though they were slower in this task than the controls. The patients' main problem appeared to involve a disturbance in activating the stored name information. The patients' response pattern shows clear resemblance with simulations of the effects of brain damage in models for person naming.

Cerebral Laterality for Famous Proper Nouns: Visual Recognition by Normal Subjects

“…In many configurations, proper noun anomia is considered another type of category naming disorder, such as the selective inability to name tools, parts of speech, or animals (Goodglass & Wingfield, 1997). Familiar proper noun anomia has been reported in left parieto-occipital (Semenza & Zettin, 1988), left fronto-temporal (Semenza & Zettin, 1989), temporal damage (Reinkemeier, Markowitsch, Rauch, & Kessler, 1977); due to head trauma (Miceli, Daniele, Esposito, & Magarelli, 1998), and left thalamic damage (Lucchelli & De Renzi, 1992;Luccelli, Muggia, & Spinnler, 1997); traumatic brain injury (Milders, 2000;Milders, Deelman, & Berg, 1999), and multiple lesion damage (Carney & Temple, 1993); following surgery for an aneurysm of the internal carotid (Fery, Vincent, & Brédart, 1995) and the posterior cerebral artery (Hanley, 1995); and from a LH degenerative process (Fadda, Turriziani, Carlesimo, Nocentini, & Caltagirone, 1998), a large LH tumor (Hittmair-Delazer, Denes, Semenza, & Mantovani, 1994), and a left temporal lobe tumor (Shallice & Kartsounis, 1993).…”

Neurophysiological evidence for crossmodal (face-name) person-identity representation in the human left ventral temporal cortex

“…These difficulties increase with ageing, with people being often concerned with a reduced ability to retrieve specific names associated with familiar faces [4][5][6][7]. An inability to accurately put a name on a face is particularly salient in patients with Alzheimer disease [8,9], semantic dementia (SD) [10,11], or traumatic brain injury [12,13].…”