Face recognition without awareness

Abstract

PH has been completely unable to recognise faces since sustaining a closed head injury some four years ago, but can recognise familiar people from their names. His performance on face processing tasks is, however, comparable to that of normal subjects if explicit recognition is not required. Thus he can make same/different identity judgements more quickly for f9miliar than unfamiliar face photographs, and faster matching of familiar faces is only found for identity matches involving the face's internal features. When making semantic categorisation decisions to printed names he shows interference from distractor faces belonging to an incorrect category, even when the faces in each category are matched on physical appearance. When learning to associate the occupation or the name with photographs of faces, his performance is better with true (face and person's actual name or occupation) than untrue (face and another person's name or occupation) pairings. Covert recognition can also be demonstrated for faces of people PH has only met since his accident. These findings show that in prosopagnosia, much of the processing of familiar faces calr remain intact despite absence of awareness that recognition has occurred.

Interaction between social categories in the composite face paradigm.

“…This shows that participants cannot ignore face occupations even when they are explicitly asked to do so. In fact, these kinds of interference effects on name categorization from the incongruent occupations of to-be-ignored faces are found even for prosopagnosic participants who are unable overtly to recognize either the identities or the occupations of the distractor faces (de Haan, Young & Newcombe, 1987a, 1987bYoung & Burton, 1999;Young, 2011).…”

Robust representations for face recognition: The power of averages

“…Hay & Young, 1982;Ellis, 1986), as well as descendents of it (Brédart, Valentine, Calder & Gassi, 1995;Burton, Bruce & Johnston, 1990;Hanley, 1995. These units have been recruited in explanations of a very wide range of phenomena, for example patterns of priming (Ellis, Young & Flude, 1990;Ellis, Flude, Young & Burton, 1996;Schweinberger, 1996;Young, Hellawell & de Haan, 1988), cross modal person recognition (Hanley & Turner, 2000;Schweinberger, Herholz & Stief, 1997) and certain characteristics of prosopagnosia (Burton, Young, Bruce, Johnston & Ellis, 1991;de Haan, Young & Newcombe, 1987;Young & Burton, 1999). However, despite the theoretical utility of this construct, all the papers cited above remain silent about how it might actually be implemented.…”

The Definition and Diagnosis of Developmental Prosopagnosia

“…In this case, testing places no demands on face memory; participants typically make a series of perceptual judgements (same/ different) about simultaneously presented faces. In the acquired prosopagnosia literature there have been reports of individuals with intact (e.g., Barton, Press, Keenan, & O'Connor, 2002;De Haan, Young, & Newcombe, 1987 and impaired (e.g., Barton et al, 2002;Young, Hellawell, & de Haan, 1988) face-perception performance, motivating a claim for different subtypes of the condition (sometimes also referred to as apperceptive and associative variants: De Renzi, Faglioni, Grossi, & Nichelli, 1991). However, other authors claim that all people with prosopagnosia show at least some deficits in face perception when appropriately tested, indicating that face-perception deficits may reside on a continuum of impairment (Farah, 1990).…”