Access to information about famous individuals in Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and normal adults were tested in two complementary recognition tasks. On each trial of the faces task, participants matched the photograph of a famous individual to one of four names. On each tial of the names task, participants matched the name of a famous individual to one of four photographs. The AD patients made enough consistent errors across the two tasks to suggest an impairment in the storage of information about the individuals. In addition, they made enough inconsistent errors to suggest a generalized retrieval deficit. The AD patients performed as well on the faces taslk as on the names task, providing no evidence of a specialized deficit in the retrieval of lexical information.