What do eye movements tell us about the visual perception of individuals with congenital prosopagnosia?

Malaspina, Manuela; Albonico, Andrea; Toneatto, Carlo; Daini, Roberta

doi:10.1037/neu0000362

Cited by 16 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 78 publications

(163 reference statements)

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“…However, higher thresholds in prosopagnosic participants could also reflect their need to acquire more information to make facial judgments than controls. This could account for the fact that prosopagnosic participants spend more time and make more fixations when judging the identity of a face (Malaspina, Albonico, Lao, Caldara, & Daini, 2018;Malaspina, Albonico, Toneatto, & Daini, 2017;Schmalzl, Palermo, Green, Brunsdon, & Coltheart, 2008;Schwarzer et al, 2007). Their greater starting point evidence (A) may support this second possibility.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Search for Face Identity or Expression: Set Size Effects in Developmental Prosopagnosia

Djouab

Albonico

Yeung

et al. 2020

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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The set size effect during visual search indexes the effects of processing load and thus the efficiency of perceptual mechanisms. Our goal was to investigate whether individuals with developmental prosopagnosia show increased set size effects when searching faces for face identity and how this compares to search for face expression. We tested 29 healthy individuals and 13 individuals with developmental prosopagnosia. Participants were shown sets of three to seven faces to judge whether the identities or expressions of the faces were the same across all stimuli or if one differed. The set size effect was the slope of the linear regression between the number of faces in the array and the response time. Accuracy was similar in both controls and prosopagnosic participants. Developmental prosopagnosic participants displayed increased set size effects in face identity search but not in expression search. Single-participant analyses reveal that 11 developmental prosopagnosic participants showed a putative classical dissociation, with impairments in identity but not expression search. Signal detection theory analysis showed that identity set size effects were highly reliable in discriminating prosopagnosic participants from controls. Finally, the set size ratios of same to different trials were consistent with the predictions of self-terminated serial search models for control participants and prosopagnosic participants engaged in expression search but deviated from those predictions for identity search by the prosopagnosic cohort. We conclude that the face set size effect reveals a highly prevalent and selective perceptual inefficiency for processing face identity in developmental prosopagnosia.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Search for Face Identity or Expression: Set Size Effects in Developmental Prosopagnosia

Djouab

Albonico

Yeung

et al. 2020

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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“…Reliance on bespoke interviews (e.g. [ 24 ]) or bespoke questionnaires (e.g. [ 25 ]), hindered the comparison of self-report evidence across different studies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Twenty Item Prosopagnosia Index (PI20) provides meaningful evidence of face recognition impairment

2021

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The Twenty Item Prosopagnosia Index (PI20) is a self-report questionnaire used for quantifying prosopagnosic traits. This scale is intended to help researchers identify cases of developmental prosopagnosia by providing standardized self-report evidence to complement diagnostic evidence obtained from objective computer-based tasks. In order to respond appropriately to items, prosopagnosics must have some insight that their face recognition is well below average, while non-prosopagnosics need to understand that their relative face recognition ability falls within the typical range. There has been considerable debate about whether participants have the necessary insight into their face recognition abilities to respond appropriately. In the present study, we sought to determine whether the PI20 provides meaningful evidence of face recognition impairment. In keeping with the intended use of the instrument, we used PI20 scores to identify two groups: high-PI20 scorers (those with self-reported face recognition difficulties) and low-PI20 scorers (those with no self-reported face recognition difficulties). We found that participant groups distinguished on the basis of PI20 scores clearly differed in terms of their mean performance on objective measures of face recognition ability. We also found that high-PI20 scorers were more likely to achieve levels of face recognition accuracy associated with developmental prosopagnosia.

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“…One group study of 10 subjects with developmental prosopagnosia as they viewed social scenes found a fixation bias for the mouth over the eyes at a group level, but with considerable heterogeneity, and did not find a difference in fixation distribution between the center and the periphery of the face [39]. More similar to our method was a study using a face-matching task, which found that a group of 12 developmental prosopagnosic subjects fixated on the mouth more than did controls [21]. Overall, some of these observations might support the lack of a normal feature hierarchy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 72%

“…Reduced scanning of the eyes was one aspect of the disorganized scanning of a subject with congenital prosopagnosia associated with epilepsy and occipital polymicrogyria [34], but this subject also had more profound visual dysfunction [52]. A similar reduction in eye-scanning bias was noted in two related subjects with developmental prosopagnosia being tested for recognition of personally familiar faces [38], and there was a trend to more scanning of the mouth in a group of 12 developmental prosopagnosic subjects as they performed a face-matching task [21]. On the other hand, a study of 10 developmental prosopagnosic subjects viewing social scenes found a tendency to scan the eyes more than the mouth at a group level, but at a single-subject level, only two scanned the mouth more than controls and none scanned the eyes less [39].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…In addition to deficient holistic processing in acquired and developmental prosopagnosia [19,20,21,22], perceptual studies have shown a selective vulnerability of certain facial regions in these conditions. On a variety of perceptual tasks, subjects with acquired prosopagnosia have been shown to have more trouble processing the eyes than the mouth [4,23,24,25,26,27] and, likewise, in developmental prosopagnosia [28,29].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Scanpaths of Subjects with Developmental Prosopagnosia during a Face Memory Task

et al. 2019

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The scanpaths of healthy subjects show biases towards the upper face, the eyes and the center of the face, which suggests that their fixations are guided by a feature hierarchy towards the regions most informative for face identification. However, subjects with developmental prosopagnosia have a lifelong impairment in face processing. Whether this is reflected in the loss of normal face-scanning strategies is not known. The goal of this study was to determine if subjects with developmental prosopagnosia showed anomalous scanning biases as they processed the identity of faces. We recorded the fixations of 10 subjects with developmental prosopagnosia as they performed a face memorization and recognition task, for comparison with 8 subjects with acquired prosopagnosia (four with anterior temporal lesions and four with occipitotemporal lesions) and 20 control subjects. The scanning of healthy subjects confirmed a bias to fixate the upper over the lower face, the eyes over the mouth, and the central over the peripheral face. Subjects with acquired prosopagnosia from occipitotemporal lesions had more dispersed fixations and a trend to fixate less informative facial regions. Subjects with developmental prosopagnosia did not differ from the controls. At a single-subject level, some developmental subjects performed abnormally, but none consistently across all metrics. Scanning distributions were not related to scores on perceptual or memory tests for faces. We conclude that despite lifelong difficulty with faces, subjects with developmental prosopagnosia still have an internal facial schema that guides their scanning behavior.

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What do eye movements tell us about the visual perception of individuals with congenital prosopagnosia?

Cited by 16 publications

References 78 publications

Search for Face Identity or Expression: Set Size Effects in Developmental Prosopagnosia

Search for Face Identity or Expression: Set Size Effects in Developmental Prosopagnosia

The Twenty Item Prosopagnosia Index (PI20) provides meaningful evidence of face recognition impairment

The Scanpaths of Subjects with Developmental Prosopagnosia during a Face Memory Task

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