Semantic expertise in the identification and naming of persons and objects I

Among the most fundamental human skills required in every-day social interactions are the abilities to recognize familiar faces and objects and the capability of fluent speech production. However, although the retrieval of stored semantic information is a vital aspect of both, person / object identification and speech production, little is known about the influence of semantic expertise on these processes: Does an increasing amount of knowledge about a familiar person or object facilitate or hamper naming? Is the retrieval of specific semantic information modulated by semantic expertise? The project investigates the influence of semantic expertise on behavioural, electrophysiological and neural correlates of these processes.