Person names, which hold within them extensive meaning, such as gender and cultural information, play an essential role in our social interaction. The intentional memory advantage of person names has been proved, but whether the automatic memory advantage of them exists remains unclear. In order to explore this question, we used a paradigm called attribute amnesia that allows us to test the automatic memory of person names in a working memory task. In Experiment 1, we adopted a classic attribute amnesia paradigm including 11 pre-surprise trials requiring participants to report the location of the target (person names or animal names) among three distractors and one surprise trial requiring them to unexpectedly report the identity of the target. The results showed that the identity report accuracy of person names in the surprise test was significantly better than that of animal names that served as a control group. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 but increased the number of pre-surprise trials that could reduce the report accuracy of surprise test according to previous studies. The results revealed that the accuracy of the surprise test of person names decreased significantly, and showed no significant difference from that of animal names. These results suggest that there exists an automatic memory advantage of person names in working memory; however, such an automatic memory advantage effect could be reduced after participants learn to stop automatically encoding the attended but no-need-to-report person names through experiencing sufficient trials.

人名具有广泛的含义，例如性别和文化信息，在我们的社交互动中发挥着重要作用。人名的有意记忆优势已被证明，但人名的自动记忆优势是否存在尚不清楚。为了探索这个问题，我们使用了一种称为属性健忘症的范式，它允许我们在工作记忆任务中测试人名的自动记忆。在实验 1 中，我们采用了经典的属性失忆范式，包括 11 次出乎意料的试验，要求参与者在三个干扰项中报告目标（人名或动物名称）的位置，以及一项要求他们出乎意料地报告目标身份的突击试验. 结果表明，突击测试中人名的身份报告准确性明显优于作为对照组的动物名。实验 2 复制了实验 1，但增加了预惊喜试验的次数，根据先前的研究，这可能会降低惊喜测试的报告准确性。结果表明，人名突击测试的准确率明显下降，与动物名无显着差异。这些结果表明，人名在工作记忆中存在自动记忆优势；然而，在参与者通过足够的试验学会停止自动编码参与但不需要报告的人名后，这种自动记忆优势效应可能会减少。