Are names difficult to recall because they are unique? A case study of a patient with anomia

According to Burton and Bruce (1992), names are more difficult to recall than biographical information about people, such as their occupation, because names are unique or highly distinctive. It follows from this that anomic patients who have great difficulty in recalling names should also find it difficult to recall other information that is unique to a particular individual. This paper attempts to evaluate this claim by examining the case of NP, a patient who has severe anomic word-finding difficulties following the rupture and repair of a posterior cerebral artery aneurysm. NP's ability to recall biographical information about people that she cannot name was investigated in a series of experiments. These revealed that she can answer specific questions about the occupations and appearance of well-known people and can recall distinctive meaningful information about them such as the identity of their spouse, even though she is unable to recall their name. It is argued that these results support the view that names are represented in a store separate from that for semantic information about people that we know. The findings are therefore consistent with the sequential stage model of face identification put forward by Bruce and Young (1986) and are explained in terms of the theory of speech production put forward by Levelt (1989).