Recall of the proper names of persons: effect of age and the modality of access]

Aging is associated with phenomena of slowing down of cognitive processes and impairment of neuropsychological performances. Elderly people also report difficulty in the retrieval of proper names. Verbal fluency (VF) tests are particularly effective for the identification of even slight mental impairments. In this experiment we utilized the usual tests of VF for semantic categories and letters of the alphabet together with three new tests of VF for first names, differing in mode of access. The first mode was free recall, the second mode was semantic (first names beginning with a particular letter), and the third mode was autobiographical (first names of relatives). There were 3 experimental groups: young people with high education level, elderly people with high education level and elderly people with low education level. The aim of our work was to verify whether aging modifies the performance in the VF tests, particularly in the three first name VF tests. No difference was found between the groups of young and elderly people with high education level. The comparison between the two groups of elderly people, with high and low education level, showed that significant differences were present in some but not in all of the VF tests. While the two groups clearly differed in semantically oriented tests, no difference could be detected in the test oriented to episodic memory. This result seems to be inconsistent with the hypothesis that aging affects mainly episodic memory.