Perceptual priming of proper names in young and older normal adults and a patient with prosopanomia

The purpose of this study was to determine if normal participants and a patient with prosopanomia can be perceptually primed for proper names. To this end, 2 experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, normative data were collected on 4 proper-name priming tasks. The variables of levels of processing at encoding and age were manipulated. Robust priming results were obtained that were not influenced by either of these variables. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that prosopanomic patient N.G. demonstrated normal repetition priming, despite her marked impairment in deliberate retrieval of person and city names. These results are interpreted in terms of a dissociation between explicit and implicit memory for proper names and suggest that the deficit in prosopanomia only involves deliberate access to the name; access to presemantic representations of the visual word form remains intact.