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Famous people recognition through personal name: a normative study

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Abstract

In this normative study, we investigated famous people recognition through personal name, using as stimuli the names of the same 40 Italian famous persons whose faces and voices had been utilized for the normative study of the Famous People Recognition Battery. For each famous people, we assessed name familiarity, person identification (when the name had been considered as familiar), and false alarms. The investigation was carried out on 143 normal subjects who varied in age and education. Name familiarity and semantic scores were affected by educational level, whereas age influenced false alarms. A comparison between results obtained with names in this research and with faces and voices of the same famous people in our previous study showed that familiarity scores were higher for personal names than those for faces and voices, which obtained the worst scores. Person identification scores were not significantly different from names and from faces, but both these scores were significantly higher than the semantic scores obtained by voices. Taken together, these results are inconsistent with the influential interactive activation and competition model of person recognition.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Neurology, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Rome, Italy

    Chiara Piccininni, Camillo Marra & Guido Gainotti

  2. Institute of Neurology, Fondazione Policlinico Universitario “Agostino Gemelli”, Largo A. Gemelli, 8, 00168, Rome, Italy

    Davide Quaranta

  3. Department of Psychology, Centre for Neuroscience, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

    Costanza Papagno

  4. CeRiN and CIMeC, University of Trento, 38068, Rovereto, Italy

    Costanza Papagno

  5. Department of Psychology, University of Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’, Caserta, Italy

    Luigi Trojano & Antonia Ferrara

  6. ICS Maugeri, IRCCS, Telese Terme, Italy

    Luigi Trojano

  7. Department of Experimental and Clinical Medicine, Polytechnic University of Marche, Ancona, Italy

    Simona Luzzi

  8. Laboratory of Clinical and Behavioural Neurology, IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Augusto Carlesimo & Guido Gainotti

Authors
  1. Chiara Piccininni
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  2. Davide Quaranta
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  3. Costanza Papagno
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  4. Luigi Trojano
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  5. Antonia Ferrara
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  6. Simona Luzzi
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  7. Giovanni Augusto Carlesimo
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  8. Camillo Marra
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  9. Guido Gainotti
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Davide Quaranta.

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The present study involved research on healthy subjects who provided their informed consent to participate.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Piccininni, C., Quaranta, D., Papagno, C. et al. Famous people recognition through personal name: a normative study. Neurol Sci 39, 663–669 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-018-3251-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-018-3251-3

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