The Face Specificity of Lifelong Prosopagnosia

Bradford Z. Mahon

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138360594
• eBook ISBN: 9780429780806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Neurociencia cognitiva y neuropsicología

Lifelong prosopagnosia has emerged as a key testing ground for theories of visual system organization, as well as the development and the emergence of neural specificity in the human brain. A key open issue concerns whether individuals who have lifelong prosopagnosia also experience difficulty with recognizing non-face stimuli. This volume features a thorough review of the congenital prosopagnosia literature and critical commentaries by the leading experts in the field. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology.

Congenital prosopagnosia without object agnosia? A literature review

Jacob Geskin and Marlene Behrmann

ABSTRACT

A longstanding controversy concerns the functional organization of high-level vision, and the extent to which the recognition of different classes of visual stimuli engages a single system or multiple independent systems. We examine this in the context of congenital prosopagnosia (CP), a neurodevelopmental disorder in which individuals, without a history of brain damage, are impaired at face recognition. This paper reviews all CP cases from 1976 to 2016, and explores the evidence for the association or dissociation of face and object recognition. Of the 238 CP cases with data permitting a satisfactory evaluation, 80.3% evinced an association between impaired face and object recognition whereas 19.7% evinced a dissociation. We evaluate the strength of the evidence and correlate the face and object recognition behaviour. We consider the implications for theories of functional organization of the visual system, and offer suggestions for further adjudication of the relationship between face and object recognition.

One of the longstanding controversies in the neuropsychology literature concerns the functional organization of high-level vision, and the extent to which the recognition of different classes of visual stimuli (for example, faces, words, and common objects) engages a single domain-general mechanism or multiple, independent underlying psychological and neural mechanisms. The distributed view of cortical function suggests that object discrimination depends on dispersed regions spread across visual cortex, some of which may support the recognition of more than one stimulus class (e.g., Behrmann & Plaut, 2015; Haxby et al., 2001; O’Toole, Jiang, Abdi, & Haxby, 2005; Robinson, Plaut, & Behrmann, 2017). In contrast, the more modular account proposes that different categories of objects are represented in and processed by functionally distinct cortical regions (e.g., Kanwisher, 2017; McKone, Crookes, Jeffery, & Dilks, 2012; McKone & Kanwisher, 2005). Of course, there are also various alternatives that fall in between these extreme positions—for example, it is possible that the organization is one in which subclusters of visual classes are subserved by the same underlying mechanism (for example, configural processing) or is one in which inputs from a single visual class are processed by a small cluster of adjacent regions perhaps interleaved with other subclusters mediating other classes of input, as evident from high-resolution functional imaging studies (e.g., McGugin, Gatenby, Gore, & Gauthier, 2012a).

This domain-specific versus domain-general controversy has played out in almost all domains of cognitive neuroscience, oftentimes with vigorous debate (Gauthier, 2017a; Kanwisher, 2017), and many investigations have addressed this issue using neuroimaging (e.g., Gauthier, Skudlarski, Gore, & Anderson, 2000; Tarr & Gauthier, 2000; Yovel & Kanwisher, 2004), electrophysiological measures (e.g., Allison, McCarthy, Nobre, Puce, & Belger, 1994; Carmel & Bentin, 2002), imaging studies in non-human primates (e.g., Arcaro & Livingstone, 2017; Chang & Tsao, 2017; Landi & Freiwald, 2017), and investigations of neuropsychological cases. Full coverage of this debate is beyond the scope of this review but many comprehensive papers are available (Grill-Spector & Weiner, 2014; Kravitz, Saleem, Baker, Ungerleider, & Mishkin, 2013).

With respect to neuropsychological investigations, this topic has received especially pointed attention in discussions of acquired prosopagnosia (AP), an impairment of face recognition in premorbidly normal individuals following a brain lesion, with the critical question being whether this disorder is limited to the recognition of faces or is, instead, more general, affecting the recognition of other non-face visual classes as well. On the one hand, many investigations of AP have argued for domain specificity in which the impairment is restricted to the perception of faces (Barton, 2008; Busigny & Rossion, 2010; Riddoch, Johnston, Bracewell, Boutsen, & Humphreys, 2008), and 27 cases of prosopagnosia without an accompanying deficit in object recognition (object agnosia) are listed in the literature review by Farah (1991). On the other hand, the results of many studies favour a more domain-general explanation for the prosopagnosia deficit and have reported an impairment not only for face recognition but for the recognition of other stimuli, as well (e.g., Bukach, Bub, Gauthier, & Tarr, 2006; Gauthier, Behrmann, & Tarr, 1999; for recent review, see Barton & Corrow, 2016b) and 37 cases of prosopagnosia with an additional recognition deficit are identified in the review by Farah (1991). Whereas the former finding of domain-specificity is more compatible with the brain being organized into modules, each with a circumscribed function as proposed by, for example, Fodor (1983) or Lenneberg (1967), the latter is more suggestive of an organization that may be contingent on a more general mechanism, such as the sensitivity to curvature (Nasr, Echavarria, & Tootell, 2014; Ponce, Hartmann, & Livingstone, 2017) or spatial frequency (Woodhead, Wise, Sereno, & Leech, 2011) or the reliance on holistic processing (Richler, Palmeri, & Gauthier, 2012). Understanding the functional organization of the visual system is critical from a theoretical point of view but also from a translational perspective in that a precise characterization of the deficits and their underlying mechanism may be of value in customizing rehabilitation approaches for those with visuoperceptual disorders (e.g., Woodhead et al., 2013).

In an effort to shed further light on the question of structure–function relations in high-level vision, the current paper examines the visual recognition behaviour of individuals with congenital prosopagnosia, a disorder that, although recognized several decades ago (e.g., Temple, 1992), is currently receiving considerable scientific attention. Congenital prosopagnosia (CP) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder in which face recognition is impaired, despite otherwise normal vision and intelligence. Importantly, in contrast with AP in which the face recognition deficit is a direct consequence of brain damage such as traumatic brain injury or stroke, CP patients have no history of brain damage or any other obvious neurological disorder (for recent reviews of this disorder, see Barton & Corrow, 2016a; Cook & Biotti, 2016; Grill-Spector, Weiner, Kay, & Gomez, 2017).

Some authors use the term “developmental prosopagno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The face specificity of lifelong prosopagnosia
• 1. Congenital prosopagnosia without object agnosia? A literature review
• 2. Association vs dissociation and setting appropriate criteria for object agnosia
• 3. Should developmental prosopagnosia, developmental body agnosia, and developmental object agnosia be considered independent neurodevelopmental conditions?
• 4. Decoupling category level and perceptual similarity in congenital prosopagnosia
• 5. On defining and interpreting dissociations
• 6. Commonly associated face and object recognition impairments have implications for the cognitive architecture
• 7. A possible neuronal account for the behavioural heterogeneity in congenital prosopagnosia
• 8. Congenital prosopagnosia: Deficit diagnosis and beyond
• 9. What do associations and dissociations between face and object recognition abilities tell us about the domain-generality of face processing?
• 10. The power of how —lessons learned from neuropsychology and face processing
• 11. Face specificity of developmental prosopagnosia, moving beyond the debate on face specificity
• 12. Objects and faces, faces and objects ….
• 13. On the use of cognitive neuropsychological methods in developmental disorders
• 14. Prosopdysgnosia? What could it tell us about the neural organization of face and object recognition?
• 15. Over time, the right results will emerge
• Index