How to remember people's names

A while ago, a friend and I were having a chat on the Metro.

Remembering I’d met her partner a few weeks before, I asked, “How’s Simon?”

“Who?” she said.

Reader, his name is Adam. Where ‘Simon’ came from, I don’t know.

I’m not alone in making this kind of flub, judging by the enormous quantity of research I found when I was writing this blog. Luckily, a lot of that research is devoted to things people can do to avoid making naming errors, so let’s get stuck into it.

Side note: I’ve focused on the research about remembering a name that belongs to a face. There is also lots of research out there (like this) on remembering a name that belongs to a voice, but I wanted to keep this blog to a manageable length and the ideas I’ll suggest for improving your memory for the links between faces and names should theoretically work if you adapt them to be about voices instead of faces, because they rely on general memory-boosting techniques rather than anything specific to vision. If you want me to do a version of this blog about the research on voices, let me know.

What makes names so hard to remember?

There are probably several reasons, according to this review from 1993 (an oldie but a goodie).

First off, names are somewhat arbitrary, which makes them harder to learn than other biographical information about a person, like their occupation. I know approximately 43 people called Cate, Kate, Katy, Katie, Cat, Catherine, Catharine, Katherine or any other variant you can think of. Literally the only thing they all have in common is their name. However, if they were all lumberjacks, they might have multiple things in common: muscular shoulders, tendency to wear plaid, often seen in the company of an axe, can magically befriend woodland creatures, etc. Those contextual clues that make it easier to recall occupations simply don’t exist for names.

🎵I’m a lumberjack and I’m called Kat🎵

🎵I’m super swole and my friend’s a bat🎵

Second, even when we know we recognise someone, their name takes a while to access. When we see a familiar person, we go through a three-stage process. To start, we realise they’re familiar, then we remember general facts about their identity, and only after that do we recall their name. A perfect real-world example of this is the conversations you have with your teammates in a Famous Faces pub quiz round: “I know that person! … She’s a drag queen! … Oh, she’s Peppermint!”

Finally, it typically becomes harder as we age to learn new names and harder still to retrieve them from our memories, leading to more and more events of the type “I know this person but what the hell is their name?” The speed of this decline in our ability to learn and remember names varies from person to person but, as a rule of thumb, if you’re over the age of about 60, you might need slightly different tactics from younger people for improving your memory for names.

What won’t work

The research I read for this blog covered both ideas that worked and ideas that really didn’t. To prevent you from wasting your energy on things you might think would work but are unlikely to, don’t bother with…

• Saying someone’s name aloud – though this is obviously helpful for some other reasons, like checking you’re pronouncing it correctly.

• Saying someone’s name aloud in a weird voice, as seen in the movie The House Bunny. You might think this works because it’s more memorable than just saying the name aloud, but the amount of physical and mental effort involved in doing a weird voice seems to outweigh any benefits of that weirdness being memorable.

• Non-invasive electrical stimulation of the brain areas involved in recalling names. While the research suggests this might have a mild benefit, it’s not enough to warrant carrying around all the equipment you’d need and paying a trained technician to apply the stimulation, not to mention we don’t know what the long-term effects of doing this all the time would be.

What will (probably) work

As with all psychology studies, remember that most of the people who take part in them belong to quite a restricted pool of humans: those who are interested in taking part in psychology studies and, often, those who are physically near psychology research facilities, which are more common in rich countries and urban areas. Much of the time these restrictions on who is able to take part means that participants are either students or employees at those research facilities, and therefore likely to be highly educated and – in the case of students – in their late teens and early twenties. Therefore, treat this list of tips with caution, because we aren’t at all clear on how well the research applies to other groups of people. These are things worth trying, but they aren’t guaranteed to work. Fortunately, at least some of the research I found had older adults as participants, so I’ve at least been able to split my tips into broad age categories.

Tips for younger adults

Scroll down if you’re aged 60+ for some tips for your age group.

Test yourself

If you’re a young adult, this is perhaps the single most effective thing you can try. However, the specific type of testing that works the best is often an absolute pain to implement in your everyday life.

If you want to give it a go, you’ll need to set up something called an expanding retrieval schedule. This means gradually increasing the time between tests, and the reason it’s a pain to implement is that the ‘test’ with learning names is usually when you meet the person again, and you won’t necessarily have much control over that. Nonetheless, there are some circumstances when it might be useful:

• If the people whose names you’re learning are OK with it, you could make a set of flashcards with photos on one side and their names on the other. If you’ve set yourself a goal of learning their names within a week, you’d test yourself on day 1, day 2, day 4, and day 7 – increasing the time between tests by one day each time.

• If everyone is new to each other, for example you’re all beginning a training course together, you can make a game out of it along the lines of the game I Went to the Shops. Gather together in a circle and pick someone to start. They say their own name. The second person says their own name, then the first person’s name. The third person says their own name, then the second person’s, then the first person’s. Carry on round the circle till you get back to the first person, who has to name everyone.

Here’s an example of the expanding retrieval game using my own name and some friends’ names as examples. You’ll notice I do know some people who aren’t called Kate, Catherine, Cat, etc.

If doing an expanding retrieval schedule is too cumbersome for you, then you can try a different testing method that is likely to be less effective but easier to do. If you’re meeting a lot of people in a short space of time, like at a wedding reception, then you’ll probably have noticed that the more people you’ve already met, the harder it is to remember the next person’s name. This is due to proactive interference – that is, the names you’ve already learned are interfering with the names you’re now trying to learn. To deal with this, once you’ve met a few people, give yourself a quick test on their names. Repeat until you’ve met all the people you need to, and you should find that you’re getting many more names correct than you otherwise would have done. The nice thing about this is it’s still effective if you do it under your breath, so no-one else has to know about it.

Try silly mental imagery

This is another strategy that’s unfortunately not that easy to implement. This time it’s not because it’s hard to organise, but rather because it requires a level of creativity that quickly gets draining if you’re meeting more than a few people. It may also distract you from other things you need to be paying attention to, like making the appropriate facial expression as they tell you an anecdote about their dog.

To explain the system, I’ll use the example of Serge Brédart, whose paper on the topic I read.

• Look for a prominent facial feature, accessory, or item of clothing that’s unlikely to change over the time you’re learning their name. From his Researchgate profile, I know that Professor Brédart wears a pair of rectangular glasses, so I’ve picked those.

• Transform their name into something that looks or sounds similar but is meaningful to you. Though it’s pronounced differently, Brédart looks to me kind of like “bread art”.

• Bring the prominent feature and the transformed name together to make one mental image that associates the two things. In this case, I might imagine his glasses are made out of bread – a piece of bread art.

You can try this in combination with an expanding retrieval schedule for an extra boost to your chances of remembering a name, but it will be even more taxing.

Use multiple senses

Name tags: use ‘em

In many situations where you’re meeting new people, they will hopefully be wearing a nametag. If you’re a young adult, to get the most out of this, you’ll want them to say their name aloud as well – the reason I suggest this is that you’ll tend to remember links between names and faces better if you have simultaneous visual and audio information about the name.

To implement this, you can either straight up explain to the person that you’re asking them their name to boost your chances of remembering it, or, if you feel shy, you can try a subtle prompt by going, “Hello, I’m [name],” which should encourage them to say their own in return.

Sleep well

For some useful tips on sleeping, ask a local cat or check out Shleep.

If you’re a young adult trying to learn people’s names over a longer period of time – for example, a teacher learning your new students’ names over the first few weeks of term – then you can relax a little, because no-one will expect you to get everyone’s name right the first day. If there’s an event like a parents’ evening when it’s ultra-important you get it right, then a good night’s sleep should help you improve your accuracy, though not the speed with which you remember someone’s name. It’s not clear what aspect of sleep helps – it could be the total time you spend asleep or something subtler like what proportion of your sleep is deep sleep.

Tips for older adults

Scroll up if you’re aged under 60 for some tips for your age group.

Minimise distractions

Imagine you work at a hospital and you’re meeting a new colleague for the first time. There are likely to be lots of distracting things around – sirens from outside, emails arriving, patients needing your help, and so on. You need to ignore all that irrelevant information as you’re trying to focus on your new colleague’s face and name. Our ability to focus on what’s relevant tends to decline as we age, so, if you’re an older adult, try to meet people in a quiet and distraction-free environment to give yourself the best chance of remembering their name.

You can also help others out – if you’re going to be meeting new people for the first time, you can try to minimise the distractions you’re wearing by saving your sparkliest brooch, brightest hijab or most garishly-patterned tie for another day.

Ask questions about them

While irrelevant information is usually unhelpful, autobiographical information about the person you’re meeting can be really useful for older adults because it gives extra context for remembering who someone is. Depending on the situation, you might want to ask about what they like to do in their spare time, where they live, or what their job is.

Ask for feedback and reminders

Young and middle-aged adults benefit from repeatedly testing themselves on names and faces, but older adults typically don’t. However, if you are an older adult, you can make repeated testing work better as a strategy for remembering names by getting feedback consisting of whether you’re right or wrong and then a reminder of the correct answer. If you’re using something like flashcards, you can give yourself feedback and reminders as part of testing. In person, it might be a little trickier, but you can try explaining that you want to do your best to remember names and asking for feedback and reminders from the people you’re meeting.

References

• Andics, A., McQueen, J. M., Petersson, K. M., Gál, V., Rudas, G., & Vidnyánszky, Z. (2010). Neural mechanisms for voice recognition. Neuroimage, 52(4), 1528-1540.

• Bender, A. R., Naveh-Benjamin, M., Amann, K., & Raz, N. (2017). The role of stimulus complexity and salience in memory for face–name associations in healthy adults: Friend or foe? Psychology and Aging, 32(5), 489-505.

• Brédart, S. (2019). Strategies to improve name learning. European Psychologist, 24(4), 349-358.

• Cohen, G., & Burke, D. M. (1993). Memory for proper names: A review. Memory, 1(4), 249-263.

• Hourihan, K. L., & Smith, A. R. (2016). Production does not improve memory for face–name associations. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue Canadienne de Psychologie Expérimentale, 70(2), 147-153.

• Maurer, L., Zitting, K. M., Elliott, K., Czeisler, C. A., Ronda, J. M., & Duffy, J. F. (2015). A new face of sleep: the impact of post-learning sleep on recognition memory for face-name associations. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 126, 31-38.

• Murray, C., Tarlow, M., Rissman, J., & Shams, L. (2021). Exploiting multisensory encoding of names via name tags facilitates remembering. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zeuq7

• Montemurro, S., Mondini, S., Crovace, C., & Jarema, G. (2019). Cognitive reserve and its effect in older adults on retrieval of proper names, logo names and common nouns. Frontiers in Communication, 4, 14.

• Patel, P. (2020). Producing names with a bizarre voice does not improve memory for face–name pairs (Master’s thesis, McMaster University). MacSphere. http://hdl.handle.net/11375/25886

• Tse, C. S., Balota, D. A., & Roediger III, H. L. (2010). The benefits and costs of repeated testing on the learning of face–name pairs in healthy older adults. Psychology and Aging, 25(4), 833-845.

• Weeks, J. C., Biss, R. K., Murphy, K. J., & Hasher, L. (2016). Face-name learning in older adults: A benefit of hyper-binding. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 23, 1559-1565.

• Weinstein, Y., McDermott, K. B., & Szpunar, K. K. (2011). Testing protects against proactive interference in face-name learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 18, 518-523.