Abstract
A common complaint of older adults is that they have trouble remembering names, even the names of people they know well. Two experiments examining this problem are reported in the present article. Experiment 1 tested episodic memory for surnames and occupations; older adults and younger adults under divided attention performed less well than did full attention younger adults, but showed no disproportionate loss of name information. Experiment 2 examined the ability to name photographs of public figures and of uncommon objects; this experiment therefore tested retrieval from semantic memory. In this case adults in their 70s did show an impairment in recall of names of known people, but not of known objects. Further analyses revealed systematic relations between naming, recognition, and rated familiarity of the categories used. Familiarity largely determined the proportions of recognizable items that were named in a prior phase. Overall, little evidence was found for a disproportionate age-related impairment in naming in either episodic or semantic memory.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to Fergus Craik, a NSERC postgraduate scholarship and support from Soroptomists International and the Scottish Rite Foundation to Alan Castel, and an Australian Catholic University Large Grant to Peter Rendell. Peter Rendell was on research leave at the University of Toronto during this project, and has now returned to the Australian Catholic University. We are grateful to Patrick Rabbitt and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on previous versions of the manuscript. We would like to thank Sharyn Kreuger for help with the experiments and analysis and Jennie Sawula for help with the preparation of the manuscript. We would also like to thank Sandra Priselac, Amy Siegenthaler, and Thomas Graham for providing access to images of famous people and Robyn Westmacott for information that helped with selecting appropriate famous people.