Apperceptive and Associative Forms of Prosopagnosia

Abstract

Three prosopagnosic patients were given four face tests, two perceptual (an unknown face identification test and an age estimation test) and two also implying memory (a familiarity check test and a famous face recognition test). The patients' performance was assessed with reference to the score distribution of the normal population. A patient was found to fail both perceptual and mnestic tests, without any noticeable difference between them. Also the second patient had poor scores on both kinds of tests, but his impairment was significantly greater on the perceptual ones. The third patient, on the contrary, showed no perceptual deficit and only failed the mnestic tests. His inability to recognize the individuality of an item among members of the same category was strictly confined to faces and never present for other classes of stimuli (cars, coins, personal belongings). This finding is supportive of the thesis that in a few patients the deficit underlying prosopagnosia is face specific.

Super‐recognisers in Action: Evidence from Face‐matching and Face Memory Tasks

“…Indeed, there is some evidence that developmental prosopagnosia is often underpinned by various deficits in the domain of perception (e.g. De Renzi, Faglioni, Grossi & Nichelli, 1991) and a similar investigation in our laboratory suggests that this is also true for SRs (Bobak, Bennetts, Jansari, Parris & Bate, in preparation). Future work could consider individual differences in general visual processing and performance on applied tasks of face matching and face recognition.…”

Structural connectivity in a single case of progressive prosopagnosia: The role of the right inferior longitudinal fasciculus

“…In the present patient both the baseline evaluation and the follow-up assessment revealed a composite clinical picture in which minor defects of configurational face analysis were associated with an impairment to experience visual familiarity for well-known faces, and a substantial impairment to associate visually perceived faces to preserved semantic information about people. This is no room here to tackle the controversial distinction between associative and apperceptive forms of prosopagnosia (De Renzi et al, 1991;Duchaine and Weidenfeld, 2003;s e eGainotti and Marra, 2011, for a recent review), but our data support the hypothesis that ILF is the most critical fibre pathway connecting regions of the core system of face processing (see Haxby et al, 2000;Catani and Thiebaut de Schotten, 2008), as proposed in the past (Benson et al, 1974;Habib, 1986;Kawahata and Nagata, 1989;Meadows, 1974;Takahashi et al, 1995). A damage of rILF would disconnect the occipital face area and the FFA from each other or from regions in the anterior temporal lobe and the precuneus (Catani et al, 2003), thus hampering modulation of right occipital lobe on temporal lobe activity.…”

An evaluation of two commonly used tests of unfamiliar face recognition

“…2 In 22 of these cases, unfamiliar face recognition was tested only with the BFRT and/or the RMF [4,5,9,12,16,[17][18][19][20]23,28,30,35,36,47,48]. Because we have demonstrated that normal scores on these tests do not require intact unfamiliar face recognition, these cases should no longer be considered support for the dissociation.…”