Accessing stored knowledge of familiar people from faces, names and voices: a review

Recent findings from neuropsychology and experimental psychology appear incompatible with the claim that feelings of familiarity about known people require activation of amodal person identity nodes. Evidence suggests that there are modality-specific effects after the point at which faces, names and voices have been found familiar. It therefore appears that activation of distinct modality-specific face, name and voice processing systems can signal that a known person is familiar. There is no convincing evidence, however, of modular effects on the way that information about familiar people is represented in semantic memory. Instead, semantic information about people appears to be stored separately from other forms of knowledge such as knowledge of objects. Anatomical evidence suggests that amodal person-specific semantic knowledge is stored in the right anterior temporal lobe where it has close connections with modality specific recognition systems. Failures to retrieve names in proper name anomia may be caused by impairments to the links between semantic knowledge in the right anterior temporal lobe and lexical representations in the left temporal pole.