Which information helps resolve face naming failures?

Personal names are particularly susceptible to retrieval failures. In the present talk, a review of studies describing people’s spontaneous strategies for resolving failures in face naming, as well as laboratory studies of experimentally-induced resolution of name recall failures are presented. This review indicates that, on the one hand, people frequently use spontaneous strategies based on a mental search for additional structural (facial appearance), semantic (biographical details) and contextual information (e.g. the context of first encounter) about the target person. On the other hand, both cueing and priming experimental studies have shown that providing phonological information may help resolve a name recall failure, whereas providing structural or semantic information is usually not helpful. A possible explanation of the spontaneous use of semantic/contextual information despite the uselessness of this kind of information will be discussed. It is proposed that 1) people’s metacognitive knowledge about the resolution of face naming failures is inaccurate; and 2) this inadequate knowledge perpetuates via a wrong inference process about the cause of naming failures resolution.