Ability to recall famous faces holds clues to Alzhemier’s

TORONTO - The ability to recall famous faces holds clues that could help in the early detection of Alzheimer’s, a new study says.

The semantic study set out to determine whether the ability to recall famous names decreases with age since the condition is one of the commonest complaints among the elderly.

Sven Joubert, psychology professor at the University of Montral, collaborated with study co-author Roxane Langlois to divide 117 healthy elderly, aged 60 to 91-years-old, into three groups who were submitted to two semantic memory tests.

“Semantic memory for people - triggered through name, voice or face - is knowledge we have gathered over the course of our lifetime on a person which enables us to recognise this person,” says study co-author Joubert.

In a first test, subjects were shown the faces of 30 famous people such as Albert Einstein, Cline Dion, Catherine Deneuve, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Wayne Gretzky.

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 result? Our ability to recall the name of someone we know upon seeing their face declines steadily in normal aging. Semantic memory for people however seems unaffected by age.

For instance, even if a subject couldn’t name George W. Bush they still knew he was a politician or president. Another finding is that healthy elderly are better at accessing biographical knowledge about famous people from their names than from their faces.

These findings motived Joubert to conduct a second study, on elderly people suffering from mild cognitive impairment and another group in the initial phase of Alzheimer’s.

“Our hypothesis was that contrary to the healthy subjects, both these groups should show difficulties finding the names of people, but that they should also show signs of a depleting semantic memory,” says Joubert.

This semantic memory test could become an essential clinical tool to identify people at risk of developing the disease, says a Montreal release.

These findings were published in the December issue of the Canadian Journal on Aging.