If you are a parent who quite often gets your children's names wrong and confuse the names your children, you know how exasperating it can be.
And it's frustrating too, if you have to go through a million names every time you want to call someone to run an errand.
"Ese, I mean, Bayo - no, I mean Haruna- can you pass me the remote, please?"
Those names don't even sound remotely similar, so why the mixup?
A study has found that names don't even have to sound entirely alike for people to get them confused repeatedly - it's actually all to do with the categories the names belong to.
Researchers conducted five studies across 1,700 people, investigating why misnaming occurs.
They found that "familiar individuals are often misnamed with the name of another member of the same semantic category."
What does this mean? Well, "family members are misnamed with another family member's name and friends are misnamed with another friend's name."
So when your mum goes through every one of your siblings names before getting to yours, it's because she's picking it out of a little filing cabinet in her brain labelled "children".
What about the names not sounding alike at all? The study found that phonetic similarity between names, leads to misnaming, but the semantic category effect was a bigger cause of people getting names wrong.
I do this a lot and it's frustrating.
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