Category-specific naming errors in normal subjects: The influence of evolution and experience

The importance of "artifactual" variables (such as conceptual familiarity) have been highlighted in current accounts of category-specific disorders fo r living things (e.g., Funnell & Sheridan, 1992). The difficulties experien ced by patients are essentially Viewed as an exaggeration of normal process es and the implication is that normal subjects should also have greater dif ficulty naming living items (because they have lower conceptual familiarity than nonliving things). The current study examined normal subjects' abilit y to name pictures of artifact-matched sets of living and nonliving things in a naming-to-deadline paradigm. Contrary to the prediction, normal subjec ts made more nonliving naming errors. Furthermore, female subjects made mor e nonliving-thing errors than male subjects. These findings could not be re duced to differences in either category-based or gender-based familiarity r atings. Rather, it is proposed that an elaborated domain-specific evolution ary model parsimoniously explains both the greater incidence of living thin g deficits in patients and the better performance of normal subjects with l iving things. (C) 2000 Academic Press.