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Holistic face perception is impaired in developmental prosopagnosia
- Source :
- Cortex. 108:112-126
- Publication Year :
- 2018
- Publisher :
- Elsevier BV, 2018.
-
Abstract
- Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DP) have severe difficulties recognising familiar faces. A current debate is whether these face recognition impairments derive from problems with face perception and in particular whether individuals with DP cannot utilize holistic representations of individual faces. To assess this hypothesis, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) during a sequential face identity matching task where successively presented pairs of upright faces were either identical or differed with respect to their internal features, their external features, or both. Participants with DP and age-matched controls reported on each trial whether the face pair was identical or different. To track the activation of cortical visual face memory representations, we measured N250r components over posterior face-selective regions. N250r components to full face repetitions were strongly attenuated for DPs as compared to control participants, indicating impaired face identity matching processes in DP. In the Control group, the N250r to full face repetitions was superadditive (i.e., larger than the sum of the two N250r components to partial repetitions of external or internal features). This demonstrates that holistic face representations were involved in identity matching processes. In the DP group, N250r components to full and partial identity repetitions were strictly additive, indicating that the identity matching of external and internal features operated in an entirely part-based fashion, without any involvement of holistic representations. In line with this conclusion, DPs also made a disproportionate number of errors on partial repetition trials, where they often failed to report a change of internal facial features. This suggests an atypical strategy for encoding external features as cues to identity in DP. These results provide direct electrophysiological and behavioural evidence for qualitative differences in the representation of face identity in the occipital-temporal face processing system in developmental prosopagnosia.
- Subjects :
- Adult
Male
Matching (statistics)
Cognitive Neuroscience
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Facial recognition system
050105 experimental psychology
Task (project management)
psyc
Young Adult
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Memory
Face perception
Orientation
Reaction Time
Humans
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Control (linguistics)
Evoked Potentials
Repetition (rhetorical device)
05 social sciences
Brain
Electroencephalography
Middle Aged
Prosopagnosia
Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
Face (geometry)
Visual Perception
Identity (object-oriented programming)
Female
Psychology
Facial Recognition
Photic Stimulation
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Cognitive psychology
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 00109452
- Volume :
- 108
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Cortex
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....0f94c04456e57ae15a7c629e4be37cfe