Developing Behavioural Tools for Characterizing Normal and Abnormal Face Perception in 6-14 Years Old Children

Which visual functions depend on intermediate visual regions? Insights from a case of developmental visual form agnosia

“…Hooper visual organization test (Hooper 1983), BORB-6 (Riddoch and Humphreys, 1993;Gilaie-Dotan et al, 2009;Lev et al, 2015), and figure-ground based on familiarity silhouettes (Brooks et al, 2012)] might also indicate that the "law of simplicity" (aka the "law of good figure" or "law of Prägnanz") and the "law of familiarity" might actually rely on previously stored perceptual representations and thus be significantly dependent on intermediate as well as on ventral object-related regions (Ostrovsky et al, 2009), whether for the creation and storage of these perceptual representations or for their retrieval. Object perception and even more so face perception, may be considered as extreme cases of the law of familiarity, in which case it is not surprising that LG's performance on a variety of these tasks is significantly impaired (see Table 2) and even resembles that of 6-8 year olds on a face memory test (Duchaine and Nakayama, 2006;Mardo et al, 2015). These dissociated Gestalt heuristics have been added to Fig.…”

“…However, since a recent developmental study shows that local-global effect magnitude is age-dependent, reducing with age (Mardo et al, 2015), there is a possibility that LG's effect magnitude actually matches that of younger age groups, corresponding to his underperformance in other highlevel visual functions. If that is the case, then the mechanisms giving rise to local-global effects could be placed in the proposed model under "V1 & V2/V3-dependent" or "V1 & V2/V3 & ventral form areas-dependent" mechanisms.…”