Retrieval Failures in Face Naming

Several authors have reported that the incidence of retrieval failures is higher for persons names than for object names. The first aim of the paper was to evaluate the role of one factor that might contribute to making face naming difficult. Face naming usually requires the retrieval of one specific label: the name of the seen individual. Object naming is less restricting. First, object names may have synonyms. Secondly, labels available from different levels of categorization of an object may be appropriate to name that object (e.g. trousers, jeans, Levis). Such a degree of freedom does not exist in naming faces. The hypothesis that face naming is made difficult by the simple fact that people have only one name was tested by studying faces having the exceptional property of bearing two names: faces of actors playing nameable characters (e.g. Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones). Consistent with the hypothesis, data from two experiments showed that when bypassing a block is possible b..