A Case of Prosopagnosia Following Moderate Closed Head Injury with Left Hemisphere Focal Lesion

Abstract

This study describes a left handed woman with prosopagnosia following traumatic brain injury with a focal lesion confined to the left-posterior hemisphere. Few cases of prosopagnosia following unilateral left hemisphere lesions have previously been reported in the literature. Corrected visual acuity was 20/70 (binocular), color vision was intact on screening, and shape detection was borderline. Impairments in higher order visual perception were evident to varying degrees on nonfacial tasks. Matching of unfamiliar faces was very slow but accurate. A marked impairment in the ability to recognize familiar faces and learn new face-name associations was evident on experimental tasks relative to the performance of healthy control subjects. In contrast, identification of characteristics of faces (gender, age) and identification and matching of facial expressions were relatively preserved. We discuss the cognitive processing stages that appear to be disrupted using Bruce and Young's (1986) model of facial recognition and perception as a framework.