Cerebral laterality for famous proper nouns: Visual recognition by normal subjects

Lexical processing has long been associated with left-hemisphere function, especially for infrequently occurring words. Recently, however, persons wit h severe aphasia, including word-recognition deficits, were observed to rec ognize familiar proper nouns. Further, some patients suffering right-hemisp here damage were poorer at identifying famous names than left-hemisphere-da maged subjects. These observations point to the possibility that some prope rty of the right hemisphere provides an advantage for the processing of fam iliar or personally relevant stimuli. To investigate this possibility, we c onducted split-visual-field studies in which we manipulated stimulus sets, recognition task, and exposure duration. Greater accuracy in the right visu al field was found for common nouns and unknown proper nouns, and famous pr oper nouns were overall more accurately recognized. Performance for famous nouns in the two visual fields was not significantly different when the tas k required categorization into famous or nonfamous and when stimuli most hi ghly rated as familiar were used. These findings support our proposals that (1) both hemispheres can process famous proper nouns and (2) the right hem isphere is specialized for personal relevance. (C) 2001 Academic Press.