A Qualitative Impairment in Face Perception in Alzheimer’s Disease: Evidence from a Reduced Face Inversion Effect

Abstract

Short title (running head): face inversion effect in Alzheimer's disease © 2 AbstractPrevalent face recognition difficulties in Alzheimer disease have typically been attributed to the underlying episodic and semantic memory impairment. The aim of the current study was to determine if AD patients are also impaired at the perceptual level for faces, more specifically at extracting a visual representation of an individual face. To address this question, we investigated the matching of simultaneously presented individual faces and of other nonface familiar shapes (cars), at both upright and inverted orientation, in a group of mild AD patients and in a group of healthy older controls matched for age and education. AD patients showed a reduced inversion effect (i.e. larger performance for upright than inverted stimuli) for faces, but not for cars, both in terms of error rates and response times. While healthy participants showed a much larger decrease in performance for faces than for cars with inversion, the inversion effect did not differ significantly for faces and cars in AD. This abnormal inversion effect for faces was observed in a large subset of individual patients with AD. These results suggest that AD patients have deficits in higher-level visual processes, more specifically at perceiving individual faces, a function that relies on holistic representations specific to upright face stimuli. These deficits, combined with their memory impairment, may contribute to the difficulties in recognizing familiar people that are often reported in patients suffering from the disease and by their caregivers.3

Understanding human individuation of unfamiliar faces with oddball fast periodic visual stimulation and electroencephalography

“…Hence, finding a significantly higher correlation of scores between monozygotic twins than dizygotic twins at the CFMT (Wilmer et al., 2010) should not be taken as evidence for a high genetic contribution specific to FI ability. Finally, the ability to individuate pictures of unfamiliar faces has been reported as being deficient in various neurological and neuropsychiatric pathologies, such as Alzheimer's disease (Lavallée et al., 2016), or autism spectrum disorder (Weigelt, Koldewyn, & Kanwisher, 2012), but these observations and their interpretations remain constantly questioned, essentially due to difficulties of comparing explicit behavioral performance across populations (Powell et al., 2019; Tang, Falkmer, Horlin, Tan, & Vaz, 2015).…”

Damasio's error – Prosopagnosia with intact within‐category object recognition

“…This would exclude mere IFR difficulties without complete impairment of the function, which are found in a large fraction of the population with right posterior brain damage (Benton & Van Allen, ; Valentine, Powell, Davidoff, Letson, & Greenwood, ; Young, Newcombe, de Haan, Small, & Hay, ), but also IFR impairments occurring during development, in a system that has not reached a high level of expertise at IFR (i.e., no ‘childhood prosopagnosia’, Young & Ellis, ). In the same vein, IFR difficulties in patients with a long history of temporal epilepsy (e.g., Drane et al ., ), neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (e.g., Lavallée et al ., ), the right temporal pole variant of frontotemporal dementia (Rtv‐FTLD (e.g., Busigny, Robaye, Dricot, & Rossion, ; Joubert et al ., ) or yet diffuse low‐grade gliomas (e.g., Corrivetti, Herbet, Moritz‐Gasser, & Duffau, ) should not be labelled (i.e., put in the same basket) as cases of prosopagnosia.…”

Comparing the sensitivity of face matching assessments to detect face perception deficits

“…Recognizing faces is a highly specialized, multistage process (Bruce & Young, 1986) that involves a network of brain regions (Grill-Spector et al, 2017;Haxby et al, 2000;Haxby & Gobbini, 2011). Though recognition of familiar faces is typically rapid and effortless (Jenkins et al, 2018), this ability can be severely impaired in many neurological, psychiatric, and developmental disorders including prosopagnosia (Albonico & Barton, 2019;Mayer & Rossion, 2007), autism spectrum disorders (Dwyer et al, 2019;Weigelt et al, 2012), Alzheimer's disease (Lavallée et al, 2016), person recognition disorders (Gainotti, 2007), as well as others (Barton et al, 2004;Dimitriou et al, 2015). The causes of face recognition deficits in these conditions vary considerably, and it is crucial to identify measures that can discern the stages of face identification impairments to help with both diagnosis (Benton & Van Allen, 1968;Benton et al, 1994;Duchaine & Nakayama, 2006;Duchaine et al, 2007) and treatment (Bate & Bennetts, 2014;DeGutis et al, 2014b, a).…”