Are faces special? A case of pure prosopagnosia

The ability to recognize individual faces is of crucial social importance for humans and evolutionarily necessary for survival. Consequently, faces may be "special" stimuli, for which we have developed unique modular perceptual and recognition processes. Some of the strongest evidence for...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognitive neuropsychology 2008-02, Vol.25 (1), p.3-26
Main Authors: Riddoch, M. Jane, Johnston, Robert A., Bracewell, R. Martyn, Boutsen, Luc, Humphreys, Glyn W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Age Factors
Aged
Attention - physiology
Biological and medical sciences
Category specificity
Cerebral Cortex - physiopathology
Configural processing
Discrimination Learning - physiology
Disorders of higher nervous function. Focal brain diseases. Central vestibular syndrome and deafness. Brain stem syndromes
Dominance, Cerebral - physiology
Face
Female
Field Dependence-Independence
Generalization, Stimulus - physiology
Humans
Intracranial Embolism - complications
Intracranial Embolism - physiopathology
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Medical sciences
Mental Recall - physiology
Middle Aged
Modular processing
Nervous system (semeiology, syndromes)
Neurology
Neuropsychological Tests
Organic mental disorders. Neuropsychology
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Prosopagnosia
Prosopagnosia - diagnosis
Prosopagnosia - physiopathology
Prosopagnosia - psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Reaction Time - physiology
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Summary:The ability to recognize individual faces is of crucial social importance for humans and evolutionarily necessary for survival. Consequently, faces may be "special" stimuli, for which we have developed unique modular perceptual and recognition processes. Some of the strongest evidence for face processing being modular comes from cases of prosopagnosia, where patients are unable to recognize faces whilst retaining the ability to recognize other objects. Here we present the case of an acquired prosopagnosic whose poor recognition was linked to a perceptual impairment in face processing. Despite this, she had intact object recognition, even at a subordinate level. She also showed a normal ability to learn and to generalize learning of nonfacial exemplars differing in the nature and arrangement of their parts, along with impaired learning and generalization of facial exemplars. The case provides evidence for modular perceptual processes for faces.
ISSN:0264-3294
1464-0627
DOI:10.1080/02643290801920113