Can names shape facial appearance?

Our given name is a social tag associated with us early in life. This study investigates the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy effect wherein individuals' facial appearance develops over time to resemble the social stereotypes associated with given names. Leveraging the face-name matching effect, which demonstrates an ability to match adults' names to their faces, we hypothesized that individuals would resemble their social stereotype (name) in adulthood but not in childhood. To test this hypothesis, children and adults were asked to match faces and names of children and adults. Results revealed that both adults and children correctly matched adult faces to their corresponding names, significantly above the chance level. However, when it came to children's faces and names, participants were unable to make accurate associations. Complementing our lab studies, we employed a machine-learning framework to process facial image data and found that facial representations of adults with the same name were more similar to each other than to those of adults with different names. This pattern of similarity was absent among the facial representations of children, thereby strengthening the case for the self-fulfilling prophecy hypothesis. Furthermore, the face-name matching effect was evident for adults but not for children's faces that were artificially aged to resemble adults, supporting the conjectured role of social development in this effect. Together, these findings suggest that even our facial appearance can be influenced by a social factor such as our name, confirming the potent impact of social expectations.

Sharing names and information: Incidental similarities between CEOs and analysts can lead to favoritism in information disclosure.

When two people coincidentally have something in common (such as a name or birthday), they tend to like each other more and are thus more likely to offer help and comply with requests. This dynamic can have important legal and ethical consequences whenever these incidental similarities give rise to unfair favoritism. Using a large-scale, longitudinal natural experiment, covering nearly 200,000 annual earnings forecasts over more than 25 y, we show that when a CEO and a securities analyst share a first name, the analyst's financial forecast is more accurate. We offer evidence that name matching improves forecast accuracy due to CEOs privately sharing pertinent information with name-matched analysts. Additionally, we show that this effect is especially pronounced among CEO-analyst pairs who share an uncommon first name. Our research thus demonstrates how incidental similarities can give way to special treatment. Whereas most investigations of the effects of similarity consider only one-shot interactions, we use a longitudinal dataset to show that the effect of name matching diminishes over time with more interactions between CEOs and analysts. We also point to the findings of an experiment suggesting that favoritism born of sharing a name may evade straightforward regulation in part due to people's perception that name similarity would exert little influence on them. Taken together, our work offers insight into when private disclosures are likely to be made. Our results suggest that the effectiveness of regulatory policies can be significantly impacted by psychological factors shaping the context in which they are implemented.

Neural correlates of retrospective memory confidence during face-name associative learning.

The ability to accurately assess one's own memory performance during learning is essential for adaptive behavior, but the brain mechanisms underlying this metamemory function are not well understood. We investigated the neural correlates of memory accuracy and retrospective memory confidence in a face-name associative learning task using magnetoencephalography in healthy young adults (n = 32). We found that high retrospective confidence was associated with stronger occipital event-related fields during encoding and widespread event-related fields during retrieval compared to low confidence. On the other hand, memory accuracy was linked to medial temporal activities during both encoding and retrieval, but only in low-confidence trials. A decrease in oscillatory power at alpha/beta bands in the parietal regions during retrieval was associated with higher memory confidence. In addition, representational similarity analysis at the single-trial level revealed distributed but differentiable neural activities associated with memory accuracy and confidence during both encoding and retrieval. In summary, our study unveiled distinct neural activity patterns related to memory confidence and accuracy during associative learning and underscored the crucial role of parietal regions in metamemory.

Real-world statistics at two timescales and a mechanism for infant learning of object names.

Infants begin learning the visual referents of nouns before their first birthday. Despite considerable empirical and theoretical effort, little is known about the statistics of the experiences that enable infants to break into object­name learning. We used wearable sensors to collect infant experiences of visual objects and their heard names for 40 early-learned categories. The analyzed data were from one context that occurs multiple times a day and includes objects with early-learned names: mealtime. The statistics reveal two distinct timescales of experience. At the timescale of many mealtime episodes (n = 87), the visual categories were pervasively present, but naming of the objects in each of those categories was very rare. At the timescale of single mealtime episodes, names and referents did cooccur, but each name­referent pair appeared in very few of the mealtime episodes. The statistics are consistent with incremental learning of visual categories across many episodes and the rapid learning of name­object mappings within individual episodes. The two timescales are also consistent with a known cortical learning mechanism for one-episode learning of associations: new information, the heard name, is incorporated into well-established memories, the seen object category, when the new information cooccurs with the reactivation of that slowly established memory.

Visible name changes promote inequity for transgender researchers.

Allowing for invisible name changes is a matter of dignity for trans researchers. This would prevent their own publication record from outing them without their consent. A single, centralized name change request through ORCID iD would alleviate the burden of changing each publication individually.

A study of the spatial distribution characteristics of Chinese surnames.

OBJECTIVES: The spatial distribution of Chinese surnames is diverse and provides rich information about the evolution of human society. This study aims to propose several indices to quantify the spatial distribution characteristics of Chinese common surnames and to explore how these distributions are related to historical evolution. METHODS: This study uses data from China's ID information system covering 1.28 billion people across 362 cities. Based on the location quotient, several new concepts, such as "moderately concentrated cities" and "highly concentrated cities," are defined. Then indices such as range, ununiformity and spatial autocorrelation are proposed and calculated to analyze the spatial characteristics of Chinese common surnames. RESULTS: A significant correlation is observed between the commonness of a surname and its spatial characteristics: the more common the surname, the wider its spatial range, the lower the ununiformity, and the higher the autocorrelation coefficient. These patterns reflect the complex interplay of historical, geographical, and cultural factors influencing surname spatial distribution. CONCLUSIONS: The spatial distribution of Chinese surnames is intricately linked to their historical evolution. Most common surnames, often with deeper historical roots, exhibit wider distributions and lower ununiformity, whereas less common surnames show higher concentrations in specific areas. These quantitative results provide a comprehensive understanding of the evolutionary characteristics of Chinese surnames.

One more trip to Barcetona: on the special status of visual similarity effects in city names.

Previous research has shown that, unlike misspelled common words, misspelled brand names are sensitive to visual letter similarity effects (e.g., amazom is often recognized as a legitimate brand name, but not amazot). This pattern poses problems for those models that assume that word identification is exclusively based on abstract codes. Here, we investigated the role of visual letter similarity using another type of word often presented in a more homogenous format than common words: city names. We found a visual letter similarity effect for misspelled city names (e.g., Barcetona was often recognized as a word, but not Barcesona) for relatively short durations of the stimuli (200 ms; Experiment 2), but not when the stimuli were presented until response (Experiment 1). Notably, misspelled common words did not show a visual letter similarity effect for brief 200- and 150-ms durations (e.g., votume was not as often recognized as a word than vosume; Experiments 3-4). These findings provide further evidence that the consistency in the format of presentations may shape the representation of words in the mental lexicon, which may be more salient in scenarios where processing resources are limited (e.g., brief exposure presentations).

Competition accumulates in successive retrieval of proper names.

Proper names are especially prone to retrieval failures and tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs)-a phenomenon wherein a person has a strong feeling of knowing a word but cannot retrieve it. Current research provides mixed evidence regarding whether related names facilitate or compete with target-name retrieval. We examined this question in two experiments using a novel paradigm where participants either read a prime name aloud (Experiment 1) or classified a written prime name as famous or non-famous (Experiment 2) prior to naming a celebrity picture. Successful retrievals decreased with increasing trial number (and was dependent on the number of previously presented similar famous people) in both experiments, revealing a form of accumulating interference between multiple famous names. However, trial number had no effect on TOTs, and within each trial famous prime names increased TOTs only in Experiment 2. These results can be explained within a framework that assumes competition for selection at the point of lexical retrieval, such that successful retrievals decrease after successive retrievals of proper names of depicted faces of semantically similar people. By contrast, the effects of written prime words only occur when prime names are sufficiently processed, and do not provide evidence for competition but may reflect improved retrieval relative to a "don't know" response.

The socio-colonial history of Surinamese surnames applied to a validated surname list to identify ancestry in health research.

Around half of the population of Suriname, who are mainly of African and South Asian descent, migrated to the Netherlands at the end of the previous century, where they face higher perinatal and maternal mortality and up to 5 years lower life expectancy than European-Dutch. Analyses by ancestry are needed to address these inequalities, but the law prohibits registration by ancestry. Therefore, a list of Surinamese surnames was compiled and validated to identify the largest groups, African-Surinamese or South Asian-Surinamese ancestry in health research. A complete database of Surinamese surnames was provided by the National Population Registry of Suriname. Surname recognition by researchers of Surinamese ancestry was used. Disagreement was resolved using historical registers and through discussion. The list was further validated against contemporary lists of Surinamese surnames with self-defined ancestry, obtained during population and clinical studies in Suriname and the Netherlands. All 71,529 Surinamese surnames were encoded, as African-Surinamese (34%), South Asian-Surinamese (18%), Brazilian or other Iberian (17%), Indonesian-Surinamese (13%), Chinese-Surinamese (5%), First Nation (2%), and other (10%). Compared to self-defined ancestry, South Asian-Surinamese surname coding had 100% sensitivity, 99.8% specificity, and 99.9% accuracy. For African-Surinamese, who may have Dutch surnames, these values depended on geocoding. With a known Surinamese origin, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were, respectively, 97.3%, 100%, and 98.6%, but without this information, there was interference of African-Surinamese with European-Dutch surnames in the Dutch validation sample. In conclusion, the Surinamese Surname List has a high accuracy in identifying persons of Surinamese ancestry. This quick, inexpensive, and nonintrusive method, which is unaffected by response bias, might be a valuable tool in public health research to help address the profound health disparities by ancestry.

Volga German surnames and Alzheimer's disease in Argentina: an epidemiological perspective.

The N141I variant (PSEN1 gene) is associated with familial forms of early-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD) in descendants of Volga Germans, whose migration to Argentina is well documented. As a proxy for geographic origin, surnames can be a valuable tool in population studies. The 2015 Argentine Electoral Registry provided geographic data for 30,530,194 individuals, including 326,922 with Volga German surnames. Between 2005 and 2017, the Ministry of Health recorded 4,115,216 deaths, of which 17,226 were attributed to AD and related causes. The study used both diachronic and synchronic data to identify patterns of territorial distribution and co-spatiality, using Moran's I and generalised linear model statistics. The frequency of surnames of Volga German origin accounts for 43.53% of the variation in deaths from AD and three clusters of high non-random frequency were found. Almost 150 years later, people descending from the Volga migration remain highly concentrated and may have a different risk of developing AD. The identification of spatial patterns provides reliable guidance for medical research and highlights the importance of specific health policies for particular populations.

Naming in a multilingual context: Norms for the ICMR-Manipal colour picture corpus in Kannada from the Indian context.

There have been many published picture corpora. However, more than half of the world's population speaks more than one language and, as language and culture are intertwined, some of the items from a picture corpus designed for a given language in a particular culture may not fit another culture (with the same or different language). There is also an awareness that language research can gain from the study of bi-/multilingual individuals who are immersed in multilingual contexts that foster inter-language interactions. Consequently, we developed a relatively large corpus of pictures (663 nouns, 96 verbs) and collected normative data from multilingual speakers of Kannada (a southern Indian language) on two picture-related measures (name agreement, image agreement) and three word-related measures (familiarity, subjective frequency, age of acquisition), and report objective visual complexity and syllable count of the words. Naming labels were classified into words from the target language (i.e., Kannada), cognates (borrowed from/shared with another language), translation equivalents, and elaborations. The picture corpus had > 85% mean concept agreement with multiple acceptable names (1-7 naming labels) for each concept. The mean percentage name agreement for the modal name was > 70%, with H-statistics of 0.89 for nouns and 0.52 for verbs. We also analyse the variability of responses highlighting the influence of bi-/multilingualism on (picture) naming. The picture corpus is freely accessible to researchers and clinicians. It may be used for future standardization with other languages of similar cultural contexts, and relevant items can be used in languages from different cultures, following suitable standardization.

Timed picture naming norms for 800 photographs of 200 objects in English.

The present study presents picture-naming norms for a large set of 800 high-quality photographs of 200 natural objects and artefacts spanning a range of categories, with four unique images per object. Participants were asked to provide a single, most appropriate name for each image seen. We report recognition latencies for each image, and several normed variables for the provided names: agreement, H-statistic (i.e. level of naming uncertainty), Zipf word frequency and word length. Rather than simply focusing on a single name per image (i.e. the modal or most common name), analysis of recognition latencies showed that it is important to consider the diversity of labels that participants may ascribe to each pictured object. The norms therefore provide a list of candidate labels per image with weighted measures of word length and frequency per image that incorporate all provided names, as well as modal measures based on the most common name only.

Similar representation of names and faces in the network for person perception.

Person-knowledge encompasses the diverse types of knowledge we have about other people. This knowledge spans the social, physical, episodic, semantic & nominal information we possess about others and is served by a distributed cortical network including core (perceptual) and extended (non-perceptual) subsystems. Our understanding of this cortical system is tightly linked to the perception of faces and the extent to which cortical knowledge-access processes are independent of perception is unclear. In this study, participants were presented with the written names of famous people and performed ten different semantic access tasks drawn from five cognitive domains (biographic, episodic, nominal, social and physical). We used representational similarity analysis, adapted to investigate network-level representations (NetRSA) to characterise the inter-regional functional coordination within the non-perceptual extended subsystem across access to varied forms of person-knowledge. Results indicate a hierarchical cognitive taxonomy consistent with that seen during face-processing and forming the same three macro-domains: socio-perceptual judgements, episodic-semantic memory and nominal knowledge. The coordination across regions was largely preserved within elements of the extended system associated with internalised cognition but differed in prefrontal regions. Results suggest the elements of the extended system work together in a consistent way to access knowledge when viewing faces and names but that coordination patterns also change as a function of input-processing demands.

Decoding subject's own name in the primary auditory cortex.

Current studies have shown that perception of subject's own name (SON) involves multiple multimodal brain regions, while activities in unimodal sensory regions (i.e., primary auditory cortex) and their interaction with multimodal regions during the self-processing remain unclear. To answer this, we combined multivariate pattern analysis and dynamic causal modelling analysis to explore the regional activation pattern and inter-region effective connection during the perception of SON. We found that SON and other names could be decoded from the activation pattern in the primary auditory cortex. In addition, we found an excitatory effect of SON on connections from the anterior insula/inferior frontal gyrus to the primary auditory cortex, and to the temporoparietal junction. Our findings extended the current knowledge of self-processing by showing that primary auditory cortex could discriminate SON from other names. Furthermore, our findings highlighted the importance of influence of the insula on the primary auditory cortex during self-processing.

Naming the menagerie: creativity, culture and consequences in the formation of scientific names.

The coining of scientific names for newly described species is one of the most creative acts in science. We briefly review the history of species naming, with an emphasis on constraints and freedoms in the choice of new names and how they came to be. We then consider patterns in etymologies and linguistic origins of scientific names across clades and through time. Use of 'non-classical' languages (those other than Latin and Greek) in naming species has increased, as has the use of eponymous names (despite recent controversy around the practice). Finally, we consider ways in which creativity in naming has consequences for the conduct and outcome of scientific work. For example, sale of naming rights has funded research and conservation, while naming species after celebrities has increased media attention to the science of species discovery. Other consequences of naming are more surprising, including a strong effect of species-name etymology on the kinds of scientific studies conducted for plant-feeding arthropods. Scientific naming is a clear example of how science and scientists are socially situated, and how culturally influenced decisions such as what to name a new species can affect both public perception of science and the conduct of science itself.

Neurophysiological evidence for crossmodal (face-name) person-identity representation in the human left ventral temporal cortex.

Putting a name to a face is a highly common activity in our daily life that greatly enriches social interactions. Although this specific person-identity association becomes automatic with learning, it remains difficult and can easily be disrupted in normal circumstances or neurological conditions. To shed light on the neural basis of this important and yet poorly understood association between different input modalities in the human brain, we designed a crossmodal frequency-tagging paradigm coupled to brain activity recording via scalp and intracerebral electroencephalography. In Experiment 1, 12 participants were presented with variable pictures of faces and written names of a single famous identity at a 4-Hz frequency rate while performing an orthogonal task. Every 7 items, another famous identity appeared, either as a face or a name. Robust electrophysiological responses were found exactly at the frequency of identity change (i.e., 4 Hz / 7 = 0.571 Hz), suggesting a crossmodal neural response to person identity. In Experiment 2 with twenty participants, two control conditions with periodic changes of identity for faces or names only were added to estimate the contribution of unimodal neural activity to the putative crossmodal face-name responses. About 30% of the response occurring at the frequency of crossmodal identity change over the left occipito-temporal cortex could not be accounted for by the linear sum of unimodal responses. Finally, intracerebral recordings in the left ventral anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in 7 epileptic patients tested with this paradigm revealed a small number of "pure" crossmodal responses, i.e., with no response to changes of identity for faces or names only. Altogether, these observations provide evidence for integration of verbal and nonverbal person identity-specific information in the human brain, highlighting the contribution of the left ventral ATL in the automatic retrieval of face-name identity associations.

Naming guides how 12-month-old infants encode and remember objects.

A foundation of human cognition is the flexibility with which we can represent any object as either a unique individual (my dog Fred) or a member of an object category (dog, animal). This conceptual flexibility is supported by language; the way we name an object is instrumental to our construal of that object as an individual or a category member. Evidence from a new recognition memory task reveals that infants are sensitive to this principled link between naming and object representation by age 12 mo. During training, all infants (n = 77) viewed four distinct objects from the same object category, each introduced in conjunction with either the same novel noun (Consistent Name condition), a distinct novel noun for each object (Distinct Names condition), or the same sine-wave tone sequence (Consistent Tone condition). At test, infants saw each training object again, presented in silence along with a new object from the same category. Infants in the Consistent Name condition showed poor recognition memory at test, suggesting that consistently applied names focused them primarily on commonalities among the named objects at the expense of distinctions among them. Infants in the Distinct Names condition recognized three of the four objects, suggesting that applying distinct names enhanced infants' encoding of the distinctions among the objects. Infants in the control Consistent Tone condition recognized only the object they had most recently seen. Thus, even for infants just beginning to speak their first words, the way in which an object is named guides infants' encoding, representation, and memory for that object.

Surnames in south-eastern France: structure of the rural population during the 19th century through isonymy.

An analysis of the distribution of surnames through time and space allows us to understand the structure of human groups, their exchanges or even their possible isolation. The French population has already been studied through surnames and it has been shown that the Sud-Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region differed from the rest of France in both the 20th and 21st centuries (Mourrieras et al., ; Scapoli et al., ). The objective of this study was to understand the population evolution and particularities of the Sud-Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region through an analysis of the distribution of surnames over an earlier period: the 19th century. For this work, 806,069 birth records from 521 communes between 1810 and 1890 were recorded and a total of 23,340 surnames were collected. The estimation of various isonymic parameters has allowed a description of this corpus never exploited before. In order to appreciate the population evolution, the data set was divided into three periods of 25 years. The canton was the geographical unit of this study, and similarities and differences between each of them were evaluated using Lasker distances, which allow the construction of dendrograms. A positive and significant correlation (p<0.0001) was found between Lasker distances and geographical distances using the Mantel test. The lowest inbreeding estimates were found in the Durance Valley. Migration, estimated from the v-index of Karlin and McGregor (), showed higher values in the south-western quarter of the region. The decrease in Rst values across the three periods is consistent with a homogenization of the patronymic between the cantons. This three-period approach showed a population evolution influenced by linguistic, cultural, historical and migratory phenomena since the Middle Ages, disrupted by the socioeconomic changes of the 19th century.