The Impact of Fatigue on Proper Name Retrieval

Forgetting people’s names in one of the most frequent memory complaints for older adults. Names have been showed to be more difficult to recall than conceptual biographical information about people such as the person’s profession or nationality, or even more specific, unique, pieces of information. Given this particular vulnerability of proper name retrieval, the present study evaluated whether cognitive fatigue impacted the retrieval of people’s names more strongly than the retrieval of biographical information about people. We found that the retrieval of people's names was affected by time on task whereas the retrieval of conceptual biographical information about people's identity was not affected. This is new evidence of the particular fragility of proper name retrieval.