Famous people recognition through personal name: a normative study

In this normative study we investigated famous people recognition through personal name, using as stimuli the names of the same 40 Italian famous persons whose faces and voices had been utilized for the normative study of the Famous People Recognition Battery. For each famous people we assessed name familiarity, person identification (when the name had been considered as familiar) and false alarms. The investigation was carried out on 143 normal subjects who varied in age and education. Name familiarity and semantic scores were affected by educational level, whereas age influenced false alarms. A comparison between results obtained with names in this research and with faces and voices of the same famous people in our previous study showed that familiarity scores were higher for personal names than for and faces and voices, which obtained the worst scores. Person identification scores were not significantly different from names and from faces, but both these scores were significantly higher than the semantic scores obtained by voices. Taken together these results are inconsistent with the influential IAC model of person recognition.