“I don’t know who you are”: anomia for people’s names in Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

It is well known that difficulty in the retrieval of people’s names is an early symptom of Alzheimer’s Disease Dementia (ADD), but there is a controversy about the nature of this deficit. In this study, we analyzed whether the nature of the difficulty in retrieving proper names in ADD reflects pre-semantic, semantic, or post-semantic difficulties. To do so, 85 older adults, 35 with ADD and 50 cognitively healthy (CH), completed a task with famous faces involving four stages: recognition, naming, semantic questions, and naming with phonological cues. Additionally, errors in spontaneous naming attempts were recorded. The ADD group was observed to consistently score lower than the CH group in all four stages. Both groups showed a greater capacity for recognition than naming, but this difference was more pronounced in the ADD group. The groups did not differ in the distribution of naming errors, with the most frequent errors being “don’t know” responses, followed by semantic errors. However, the ADD group showed significantly fewer semantic errors than the CH group. The ADD group benefited less from semantic questions and phonological cues in retrieving the forgotten names of the famous people, and also showed less semantic knowledge about them. These results suggest that the difficulties people with ADD have in naming reflect a degradation at semantic level.