Abstract
Congenital prosopagnosia (CP) refers to a lifelong impairment in face processing despite normal visual and intellectual skills. Many studies have suggested that the key underlying deficit in CP is one of a failure to engage holistic processing. Moreover, there has been some suggestion that, in normal observers, there may be greater involvement of the right than left hemisphere in holistic processing. To examine the proposed deficit in holistic processing and its potential hemispheric atypicality in CP, we compared the performance of 8 CP individuals with both matched controls and a large group of non-matched controls on a novel, vertical composite task. In this task, participants judged whether a cued half of a face (either left or right half) was the same or different at study and test, and the two face halves could be either aligned or misaligned. The standard index of holistic processing is one in which the unattended face half influences performance on the cued half and this influence is greater in the aligned than in the misaligned condition. Relative to controls, the CP participants, both at a group and at an individual level, did not show holistic processing in the vertical composite task. There was also no difference in performance as a function of hemifield of the cued face half in the CP individuals, and this was true in the control participants, as well. The findings clearly confirm the deficit in holistic processing in CP and reveal the useful application of this novel experimental paradigm to this population and potentially to others as well.
Highlights
Congenital prosopagnosia (CP) refers to the apparently lifelong impairment in face recognition despite normal vision, intelligence, and other cognitive skills
Unlike acquired prosopagnosia (AP) which results from explicit brain damage and is rare, CP is more common in the population at large in both the Caucasian (Kennerknecht et al, 2006), and non-Caucasian population (Kennerknecht et al, 2007, 2008), and runs in some families
Because of the possible heterogeneity in HOLISTIC PROCESSING (HP) in CP individuals, we undertook an analysis of performance at the individual level and we report these data below
Summary
Congenital prosopagnosia (CP) refers to the apparently lifelong impairment in face recognition despite normal vision, intelligence, and other cognitive skills. Of importance to vision science, CP offers a unique window into understanding the psychological and neural mechanism of face processing and, as such, this neurodevelopmental condition has received considerable attention recently. Much of the recent research has explored the neural basis of CP and has identified differences, relative to controls, in the distributed face network. These differences are apparent to a greater degree in the more extended/anterior portions of the network than in the more core/posterior regions (Avidan and Behrmann, 2014; Avidan et al, 2014; but see Furl et al, 2010 for a different finding). Studies that explore the psychological or computational basis of CP have largely focused on the failure of these individuals to process visual information holistically and the goal of this study is to explore this further
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