Person Recognition and Ageing: The Cognitive Status of Addresses—An Empirical Question

Thirty young and 30 elderly adults were enrolled in the learning (4 trials) of the name, the occupation and the address of 10 unfamiliar persons whose faces were shown. This experiment was planned as an attempt to clarify the cognitive status of the address within the cognitive architecture of person recognition, especially in relation to the names and the semantic information. Two main features emerged. First, beyond a general detrimental effect of age, the patterns of results were very similar in young and elderly subjects, in agreement with other reported data. Second, the processing of the address is much more like the processing of names than the processing of semantic information (occupation). However, unlike names, the recall of addresses is influenced by the ambiguity of the labels used.