Learning People's Names Following Severe Closed-Head Injury

Although problems remembering people's names rank highly among the subjective complaints of patients with closed-head injuries, very few studies have examined their memory for people's names by objective measurements. An experiment is reported in which patients with severe closed-head injuries and normal controls learned the same set of words, either as names or as possessions, for unfamiliar faces. Name learning proved to be impaired in the patients. Patient recall of meaningless names and possessions which were described by nonwords was equally poor. The patients, but not the controls, recalled significantly fewer names than possessions if these items were described by concrete nouns. This last finding suggests that the patients' problems with learning people's names can not be fully explained by a general verbal learning impairment.