The Effects of Right/Left Temporal Lobe Lesions on the Recognition of Familiar Faces

Abstract

Recognition of familiar people can be based on three main sources of information: the face, the voice and the name, but the face has usually the greatest impact on this important social skill. For this reason the study of ‘prosopagnosia’, considered as a form of visual agnosia, specifically concerning the recognition of familiar people through their face, has represented, since the proposal of this term by Bodamer (1947), the dominant and almost exclusive line of research in this field of inquiry. For the same reason, the first cognitive model that has tried to analyse the cognitive and subjective/behavioural stages involved in recognition and identification of familiar people is the Bruce et Young’s (1986) model of familiar faces recognition. The first cognitive step of this model is the formation of a view independent structural description of a seen face, which can be compared with all the known faces stored in the Face Recognition Units (FRUs). A similar process was afterwards hypothesized for other sources of person recognition, such as voices and names, by several authors (Bredart et al., 1995; Burton et al., 1990; Burton et al., 1999; Valentine et al., 1996; Young & Burton, 1999), who assumed that the outcome of the corresponding perceptual processing could be matched with information stored in correlative Voice (VRUs) or Name Recognition Units (NRUs). According to all these models, the second step of the people identification process requires the convergence of information stored in these modalityspecific units into person-identity nodes (PINs), allowing identification of a particular person and retrieval of the corresponding semantic (biographical) information. The PINs (or the accessed person-specific knowledge) could, in turn, activate the phonological codes underlying the production of the person's proper name. In spite of the general similarities existing among the model proposed by Bruce and Young (1986) and those offered by following authors, there are also important differences among these models, which concern the locus in which familiarity feelings for the addressed person are generated and in which person-specific information is stored. As for the first point, the Bruce and Young (1986) model assumed that familiarity feelings are generated in the modality-specific recognition units where (for instance) the structural description of a seen face is compared to the familiar faces stored in the FRUs. On the contrary, in the Burton et