Who is who: Italian norms for visual recognition and identification of celebrities

Abstract Age-, education- and sex-adjusted norms are provided for two new neuropsychological tests, namely (i) Face Recognition (guess of familiarity) and (ii) Person Identification (biographical contextualisation). Sixty-three pictures of celebrities and 63 of unknown people were selected following two interwoven criteria¹: the realm of their celebrity (i. e., entertainment, culture and politics) and the period of celebrity acquisition (i. e., pre-war, post-war and contemporary). Both media- and education-dependent knowledge of celebrity were considered. Ninety-eight unpaid healthy participants aged between 50 and 93 years and with at least 8 years of formal education took part in this study. Reference is made to serial models of familiar face/persons processing. Recognition is held to tackle the activity of Personal Identity Nodes (PINs) and identification of the Exemplar Semantics Archives. Given the seriality of the reference model, the Identification Test is embedded in the Recognition test. This entailed that only previously recognised faces were employed to achieve norms for identification. Note As the collaboration of each author was essential for the study, following our normal practice, names have been listed in alphabetical order. I.B. and H.S. proposed the study. F.F. and S.P. collected the data. C.S. carried out the statistical analyses. I.B. collaborated with H.S. in writing the text. ¹Authors can provide on request the CD-ROM with the face stimuli (Fig. 2 in this paper) and the blank protocols for running the two tests at issue. An erratum to this article can be found at .