P2-29: Comparing the Other-Race-Effect and Congenital Prosopagnosia Using a Three-Experiment Test Battery

Abstract

Congenital prosopagnosia, an innate impairment in recognizing faces, as well as the other-race-effect, the disadvantage in recognizing faces of foreign races, both influence face recognition abilities. Here we compared both phenomena by testing three groups: German congenital prosopagnosics (cPs), unimpaired German, and unimpaired South Korean participants (n = 23 per group), on three tests with Caucasian faces. First we ran the Cambridge Face Memory Test (Duchaine & Nakayama, 2006 Neuropsychologia44 576–585). Participants had to recognize Caucasian target faces in a 3AFC task. German controls performed better than Koreans (p = .009) who performed better than prosopagnosics (p = .0001). Variation of the individual performances was larger for cPs than for Koreans (p = .028). In the second experiment, participants rated the similarity of Caucasian faces (in-house 3D face-database) which differed parametrically in features or second order relations (configuration). We found differences between sensitivities ...