ABSTRACT
As we have already seen, one of the major reasons for cognitive psychologists’ interest in the study of proper names derives from the particular difficulty which people appear to have in recalling proper names. The category of proper names which seems to pose the biggest problem is that of people’s names: the feeling that a name is on the tip of the tongue is more frequently provoked when trying to recall a person’s name than when recalling other types of proper name, e.g. names of cities, product names, etc. The studies of the so-called ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ states and the relationship between different types of proper names will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. In this chapter the cognitive approach to the study of recall of proper names will be reviewed. The focus is almost exclusively on recall of people’s names, as this is the category of proper names with which the vast majority of research in this tradition has been concerned. Before addressing theoretical accounts of why people’s names are so difficult to recall, it is necessary to introduce an information-processing model of face recognition and some methods, most notably repetition priming and semantic priming, which are commonly employed to test such models empirically. Finally, more recent work in which face processing is modelled by computer simulation of an interactive activation network will be discussed.
