Developmental disturbance of access to biographical information and people's names: a single-case study

The paper describes the case of a person (GB) without any clinical evidence of cerebral disease who showed a specific impairment in the retrieval of biographical information, including names, about famous people. This deficit appeared while GB scored normally in different long-term memory tasks, and in object naming tasks. Moreover, he showed no impairment in the structural encoding and the recognition of faces. His specific impairment is interpreted both in terms of Bruce and Young's (1986) functional model of person recognition and in terms of the more recent Burton et al. (1990) interactive activation version of the Bruce and Young model.