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Why can you remember a face but forget a name?

You recognize someone immediately, remember where you met and still cannot produce their name. Familiarity, information about a person and the name are different things to retrieve. A classic computational account asks whether names’ relative uniqueness helps explain the mismatch.

3–7 min

Questions you could explore

  • Which cue would help you recognize a person but still leave their name out of reach?
  • How does recognizing a face differ from retrieving a particular name associated with it?

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Why can you remember a face but forget a name? | Speech Topic | speaking.app