Influence of educational level of non brain-damaged subjects on visual naming capacities

Educational level of subjects is a variable often neglected in neuropsychological studies. However, there are pieces of evidence to suggest that illiterate subjects may perform worse than literate subjects in some tests. Visual naming is one of the tasks where a poor performance was reported in illiterate populations. The present study addresses this problem of comparing the performance in visual naming tasks of non-brain-damaged patients of different educational levels. The test materials were composed of three subtests: naming real objects, their photographs, and line drawings of the same objects. Results revealed that there is a clear influence of educational level on the ability to name photographs and line drawings of the objects. Naming line drawings is particularly difficult for the lower educated non-brain-damaged subjects. Visual analysis of two dimensional representations is a task that requires special learning. These results have to be taken into consideration in test selection for poorly educated populations.