I recognize your face, but I can’t remember your name: A question of expertise?

In four experiments on the identification of familiar faces we reassessed a robust performance pattern—namely, the temporal advantage for retrieving biographical facts as compared to recall-ingproper names,whichhas been interpreted as reflecting a serial ordering of the access to seman-tic and name information. Evidence for recent parallel accounts had been provided by Scanlan and Johnston (1997)who reported an advantage for name retrieval in children.Herewe replicated the findings of Scanlan and Johnston but also showed that the naming advantage disappears, and performance is very similar to that of adults when stimuli and tasks are used that are familiar to children.Conversely,we also demonstrated an advantage for name retrieval in adultswhenhighly unfamiliar semantic facts were associated with the faces. Together these findings suggest that there is no fundamental difference in the cognitive architectures of children and adults. The experiments indicate that the relative speed of naming and semantic fact retrieval depends on the expertisewith the semantic facts to be retrieved. Implications formodels of face identification and naming are discussed. The ability to recognize and identify familiar faces as belonging to, for example, a politician named “Tony Blair ” is an essential skill for everyday life. Research on face-naming perfor