Recall of Celebrities’ Faces and Facts as A Future Alzheimer’s Assessment Tool

Semantic memory is recall triggered by a name, face, or voice, and is the collective knowledge we have accumulated over the course of our lifetime on a person which enables us to recognize that individual.  Roxane Langlois from the University de Montréal (Canada), and colleagues studied 117 healthy adults, ages 60 to 91 years, to determine whether the ability to recall names of famous people decreases with age, since the condition known as anomia ranks among the most common complaints from the elderly.  In a first test, subjects were shown the faces of 30 famous people such as Albert Einstein, Celine Dion,  Wayne Gretzky, and others. They were first asked to name these famous faces, and then questioned on their professions, nationality and specific life events. In a second test a few weeks later, subjects were shown the names of the same 30 celebrities and were questioned again on biographical knowledge. The researchers discovered that our ability to recall the name of someone we know upon seeing their face declines steadily in normal aging. The team suggests that this semantic memory test could become an essential clinical tool to identify people at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.  Results show that the ability to remember names is even more pronounced in mild cognitive impairment and in early Alzheimer’s disease than in normal aging. Contrary to normal aging, however, a decline in semantic memory for famous people was also observed.