Impaired holistic processing of unfamiliar individual faces in acquired prosopagnosia

Abstract

Prosopagnosia is an impairment at individualizing faces that classically follows brain damage. Several studies have reported observations supporting an impairment of holistic/configural face processing in acquired prosopagnosia. However, this issue may require more compelling evidence as the cases reported were generally patients suffering from integrative visual agnosia, and the sensitivity of the paradigms used to measure holistic/configural face processing in normal individuals remains unclear. Here we tested a well-characterized case of acquired prosopagnosia (PS) with no object recognition impairment, in five behavioral experiments (whole/part and composite face paradigms with unfamiliar faces). In all experiments, for normal observers we found that processing of a given facial feature was affected by the location and identity of the other features in a whole face configuration. In contrast, the patient's results over these experiments indicate that she encodes local facial information independently of the other features embedded in the whole facial context. These observations and a survey of the literature indicate that abnormal holistic processing of the individual face may be a characteristic hallmark of prosopagnosia following brain damage, perhaps with various degrees of severity.