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Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences Apr 2015
Topics: Humans; Male; Prosopagnosia; Referral and Consultation; Young Adult
PubMed: 25112414
DOI: 10.1111/pcn.12233 -
Neuropsychologia 2006The two standardized tests of face recognition that are widely used suffer from serious shortcomings [Duchaine, B. & Weidenfeld, A. (2003). An evaluation of two commonly...
The Cambridge Face Memory Test: results for neurologically intact individuals and an investigation of its validity using inverted face stimuli and prosopagnosic participants.
The two standardized tests of face recognition that are widely used suffer from serious shortcomings [Duchaine, B. & Weidenfeld, A. (2003). An evaluation of two commonly used tests of unfamiliar face recognition. Neuropsychologia, 41, 713-720; Duchaine, B. & Nakayama, K. (2004). Developmental prosopagnosia and the Benton Facial Recognition Test. Neurology, 62, 1219-1220]. Images in the Warrington Recognition Memory for Faces test include substantial non-facial information, and the simultaneous presentation of faces in the Benton Facial Recognition Test allows feature matching. Here, we present results from a new test, the Cambridge Face Memory Test, which builds on the strengths of the previous tests. In the test, participants are introduced to six target faces, and then they are tested with forced choice items consisting of three faces, one of which is a target. For each target face, three test items contain views identical to those studied in the introduction, five present novel views, and four present novel views with noise. There are a total of 72 items, and 50 controls averaged 58. To determine whether the test requires the special mechanisms used to recognize upright faces, we conducted two experiments. We predicted that controls would perform much more poorly when the face images are inverted, and as predicted, inverted performance was much worse with a mean of 42. Next we assessed whether eight prosopagnosics would perform poorly on the upright version. The prosopagnosic mean was 37, and six prosopagnosics scored outside the normal range. In contrast, the Warrington test and the Benton test failed to classify a majority of the prosopagnosics as impaired. These results indicate that the new test effectively assesses face recognition across a wide range of abilities.
Topics: Adolescent; Adult; Aged; Attention; Discrimination Learning; Face; Female; Field Dependence-Independence; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Neuropsychological Tests; Orientation; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Perceptual Masking; Practice, Psychological; Prosopagnosia; Psychometrics; Reference Values
PubMed: 16169565
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2005.07.001 -
Scientific Reports Dec 2019Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterised by difficulties recognising and discriminating faces. It is currently unclear whether...
Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterised by difficulties recognising and discriminating faces. It is currently unclear whether the perceptual impairments seen in DP are restricted to identity information, or also affect the perception of other facial characteristics. To address this question, we compared the performance of 17 DPs and matched controls on two sensitive sex categorisation tasks. First, in a morph categorisation task, participants made binary decisions about faces drawn from a morph continuum that blended incrementally an average male face and an average female face. We found that judgement precision was significantly lower in the DPs than in the typical controls. Second, we used a sex discrimination task, where female or male facial identities were blended with an androgynous average face. We manipulated the relative weighting of each facial identity and the androgynous average to create four levels of signal strength. We found that DPs were significantly less sensitive than controls at each level of difficulty. Together, these results suggest that the visual processing difficulties in DP extend beyond the extraction of facial identity and affects the extraction of other facial characteristics. Deficits of facial sex categorisation accord with an apperceptive characterisation of DP.
Topics: Adult; Discrimination, Psychological; Facial Recognition; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Photic Stimulation; Prosopagnosia; Sex Characteristics; Task Performance and Analysis
PubMed: 31836836
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-55569-x -
Experimental Brain Research Mar 2019Prosopagnosia is a disorder leading to difficulties in recognizing faces. However, recent evidence suggests that individuals with congenital prosopagnosia can achieve...
Prosopagnosia is a disorder leading to difficulties in recognizing faces. However, recent evidence suggests that individuals with congenital prosopagnosia can achieve considerable accuracy when they have to recognize their own faces (self-face advantage). Yet, whether this advantage is face-specific or not is still unclear. Here, we aimed to investigate whether individuals with congenial prosopagnosia show a self-advantage also in recognizing other self body-parts and, if so, whether the advantage for the body parts differs from the one characterizing the self-face. Eight individuals with congenital prosopagnosia and 22 controls underwent a delayed matching task in which they were required to recognize faces, hands and feet belonging to the self or to others. Controls showed a similar self-advantage for all the stimuli tested; by contrast, individuals with congenital prosopagnosia showed a larger self-advantage with faces compared to hands and feet, mainly driven by their deficit with others' faces. In both groups the self-advantages for the different body parts were strongly and significantly correlated. Our data suggest that the self-face advantage showed by individuals with congenital prosopagnosia is not face-specific and that the same mechanism could be responsible for both the self-face and self body-part advantages.
Topics: Adult; Face; Facial Recognition; Female; Foot; Hand; Humans; Male; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Prosopagnosia; Recognition, Psychology; Self Concept; Young Adult
PubMed: 30542755
DOI: 10.1007/s00221-018-5452-7 -
Handbook of Clinical Neurology 2022Face perception is a socially important but complex process with many stages and many facets. There is substantial evidence from many sources that it involves a large... (Review)
Review
Face perception is a socially important but complex process with many stages and many facets. There is substantial evidence from many sources that it involves a large extent of the temporal lobe, from the ventral occipitotemporal cortex and superior temporal sulci to anterior temporal regions. While early human neuroimaging work suggested a core face network consisting of the occipital face area, fusiform face area, and posterior superior temporal sulcus, studies in both humans and monkeys show a system of face patches stretching from posterior to anterior in both the superior temporal sulcus and inferotemporal cortex. Sophisticated techniques such as fMRI adaptation have shown that these face-activated regions show responses that have many of the attributes of human face processing. Lesions of some of these regions in humans lead to variants of prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize the identity of a face. Lesion, imaging, and electrophysiologic data all suggest that there is a segregation between identity and expression processing, though some suggest this may be better characterized as a distinction between static and dynamic facial information.
Topics: Cerebral Cortex; Facial Recognition; Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Prosopagnosia; Temporal Lobe
PubMed: 35964972
DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-12-823493-8.00019-5 -
ELife Aug 2017Using a novel, fMRI-based inter-subject functional correlation (ISFC) approach, which isolates stimulus-locked inter-regional correlation patterns, we compared the...
Using a novel, fMRI-based inter-subject functional correlation (ISFC) approach, which isolates stimulus-locked inter-regional correlation patterns, we compared the cortical topology of the neural circuit for face processing in participants with an impairment in face recognition, congenital prosopagnosia (CP), and matched controls. Whereas the anterior temporal lobe served as the major network hub for face processing in controls, this was not the case for the CPs. Instead, this group evinced hyper-connectivity in posterior regions of the visual cortex, mostly associated with the lateral occipital and the inferior temporal cortices. Moreover, the extent of this hyper-connectivity was correlated with the face recognition deficit. These results offer new insights into the perturbed cortical topology in CP, which may serve as the underlying neural basis of the behavioral deficits typical of this disorder. The approach adopted here has the potential to uncover altered topologies in other neurodevelopmental disorders, as well.
Topics: Adult; Aged; Brain Mapping; Cerebral Cortex; Female; Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Middle Aged; Nerve Net; Prosopagnosia; Young Adult
PubMed: 28825896
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.25069 -
Cortex; a Journal Devoted To the Study... Oct 2015Developmental prosopagnosia is a disorder of face recognition that is believed to reflect impairments of visual mechanisms. However, voice recognition has rarely been...
BACKGROUND
Developmental prosopagnosia is a disorder of face recognition that is believed to reflect impairments of visual mechanisms. However, voice recognition has rarely been evaluated in developmental prosopagnosia to clarify if it is modality-specific or part of a multi-modal person recognition syndrome.
OBJECTIVE
Our goal was to examine whether voice discrimination and/or recognition are impaired in subjects with developmental prosopagnosia.
DESIGN/METHODS
73 healthy controls and 12 subjects with developmental prosopagnosia performed a match-to-sample test of voice discrimination and a test of short-term voice familiarity, as well as a questionnaire about face and voice identification in daily life.
RESULTS
Eleven subjects with developmental prosopagnosia scored within the normal range for voice discrimination and voice recognition. One was impaired on discrimination and borderline for recognition, with equivalent scores for face and voice recognition, despite being unaware of voice processing problems.
CONCLUSIONS
Most subjects with developmental prosopagnosia are not impaired in short-term voice familiarity, providing evidence that developmental prosopagnosia is usually a modality-specific disorder of face recognition. However, there may be heterogeneity, with a minority having additional voice processing deficits. Objective tests of voice recognition should be integrated into the diagnostic evaluation of this disorder to distinguish it from a multi-modal person recognition syndrome.
Topics: Acoustic Stimulation; Adult; Aged; Discrimination, Psychological; Face; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Neuropsychological Tests; Prosopagnosia; Psychomotor Performance; Recognition, Psychology; Voice; Young Adult
PubMed: 26321070
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2015.07.030 -
Cognitive Neuropsychology 2015It has long been suggested that face recognition relies on specialized mechanisms that are not involved in visual recognition of other object categories, including those...
It has long been suggested that face recognition relies on specialized mechanisms that are not involved in visual recognition of other object categories, including those that require expert, fine-grained discrimination at the exemplar level such as written words. But according to the recently proposed many-to-many theory of object recognition (MTMT), visual recognition of faces and words are carried out by common mechanisms [Behrmann, M., & Plaut, D. C. ( 2013 ). Distributed circuits, not circumscribed centers, mediate visual recognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 210-219]. MTMT acknowledges that face and word recognition are lateralized, but posits that the mechanisms that predominantly carry out face recognition still contribute to word recognition and vice versa. MTMT makes a key prediction, namely that acquired prosopagnosics should exhibit some measure of word recognition deficits. We tested this prediction by assessing written word recognition in five acquired prosopagnosic patients. Four patients had lesions limited to the right hemisphere while one had bilateral lesions with more pronounced lesions in the right hemisphere. The patients completed a total of seven word recognition tasks: two lexical decision tasks and five reading aloud tasks totalling more than 1200 trials. The performances of the four older patients (3 female, age range 50-64 years) were compared to those of 12 older controls (8 female, age range 56-66 years), while the performances of the younger prosopagnosic (male, 31 years) were compared to those of 14 younger controls (9 female, age range 20-33 years). We analysed all results at the single-patient level using Crawford's t-test. Across seven tasks, four prosopagnosics performed as quickly and accurately as controls. Our results demonstrate that acquired prosopagnosia can exist without word recognition deficits. These findings are inconsistent with a key prediction of MTMT. They instead support the hypothesis that face recognition is carried out by specialized mechanisms that do not contribute to recognition of written words.
Topics: Adult; Aged; Case-Control Studies; Decision Making; Face; Facial Recognition; Female; Humans; Language; Male; Middle Aged; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Prosopagnosia; Reading; Writing; Young Adult
PubMed: 26402384
DOI: 10.1080/02643294.2015.1081882 -
Cortex; a Journal Devoted To the Study... Aug 2007Prosopagnosia is defined as a specific type of visual agnosia characterised by a discernible impairment in the capacity to recognise familiar people by their faces. We...
Prosopagnosia is defined as a specific type of visual agnosia characterised by a discernible impairment in the capacity to recognise familiar people by their faces. We present seven family pedigrees with 38 cases in two to four generations of suspected hereditary prosopagnosia, detected using a screening questionnaire. Men and women are impaired and the anomaly is regularly transmitted from generation to generation in all pedigrees studied. Segregation is best explained by a simple autosomal dominant mode of inheritance, suggesting that loss of human face recognition can occur by the mutation of a single gene. Eight of the 38 affected persons were tested on the Warrington Recognition Memory Test for Faces (RMF; Warrington, 1984), famous and family faces tests, learning tests for internal and external facial features and a measure of mental imagery for face and non-face images. As a group, the eight participants scored significantly below an age- and education-matched comparison group on the most relevant test of face recognition; and all were impaired on at least one of the tests. The results provide compelling evidence for significant genetic contribution to face recognition skills and contribute to the promise offered by the emerging field of cognitive neurogenetics.
Topics: Adult; Child; Child, Preschool; Facial Expression; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Neuropsychological Tests; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Pedigree; Prosopagnosia; Quantitative Trait, Heritable; Recognition, Psychology
PubMed: 17710825
DOI: 10.1016/s0010-9452(08)70502-1 -
Cognitive Neuropsychology 2016The "many-to-many" hypothesis proposes that visual object processing is supported by distributed circuits that overlap for different object categories. For faces and...
The "many-to-many" hypothesis proposes that visual object processing is supported by distributed circuits that overlap for different object categories. For faces and words the hypothesis posits that both posterior fusiform regions contribute to both face and visual word perception and predicts that unilateral lesions impairing one will affect the other. However, studies testing this hypothesis have produced mixed results. We evaluated visual word processing in subjects with developmental prosopagnosia, a condition linked to right posterior fusiform abnormalities. Ten developmental prosopagnosic subjects performed a word-length effect task and a task evaluating the recognition of word content across variations in text style, and the recognition of style across variations in word content. All subjects had normal word-length effects. One had prolonged sorting time for word recognition in handwritten stimuli. These results suggest that the deficit in developmental prosopagnosia is unlikely to affect visual word processing, contrary to predictions of the many-to-many hypothesis.
Topics: Adult; Aged; Face; Facial Recognition; Female; Humans; Language; Male; Middle Aged; Models, Neurological; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Prosopagnosia
PubMed: 27593455
DOI: 10.1080/02643294.2016.1204281