PERCEPTUAL PRIMING OF PROPER-NAMES IN YOUNG AND OLDER NORMAL ADULTS AND A PATIENT WITH PROSOPANOMIA

The purpose of this study was to determine if normal participants and a patient with prosopanomia can be perceptually primed for proper name s. To this end, 2 experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, normati ve data were collected on 4 proper-name priming tasks. The variables o f levels of processing at encoding and age were manipulated. Robust pr iming results were obtained that were not influenced by either of thes e variables. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that prosopanomic p atient N.G. demonstrated normal repetition priming, despite her marked impairment in deliberate retrieval of person and city names. These re sults are interpreted in terms of a dissociation between explicit and implicit memory for proper names and suggest that the deficit in proso panomia only involves deliberate access to the name; access to presema ntic representations of the visual word form remains intact.