[The effects of normal aging on face naming and recognition of famous people: battery 75].
The difficulty to recall proper nouns is often something elderly people complain about. Thus, we tried to build and standardize a tool that could allow a quantified estimation of the naming and recognition abilities about famous people faces, specifying the part of gender, age and cultural level for each kind of test. The performances of 542 subjects divided in 3 age brackets and 3 academic knowledge levels were analysed. To carry out the test material, the artistic team of the Grevin Museum (Paris) was called upon. Their work offers a homogeneous way to shape famous people faces. One same person thus photographed 75 characters from different social categories with the same conditions of light, during only one day. The results of the study show that men perform better than women as concerns naming task, but that there's no difference between genders as concerns recognition task. Recognition performances are significantly better whatever the age, the gender and the cultural level may be. Generally, performances are all the more better since subjects are younger and have a higher cultural level. Our study then confirms the fact that normal aging goes hand in hand with rising difficulties to name faces. Moreover, results tend to show that recognition of faces remains better preserved and that the greater disability to recall a name is linked to difficulties in lexical accessing.
Pluchon
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C
Service de Neurologie, Unité de Neuropsychologie et Rééducation du Langage, CHU Jean Bernard, Rue de la Milétrie, BP 577, 86021 Poitiers. r.gil@chu-poitiers.fr
Simonnet
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E
Toullat
G
G
Gil
R
R
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D012938:Social Perception