False Recognition and Misidentification of Faces Following Right Hemisphere Damage

Belief and awareness: reflections on a case of persistent anosognosia

“…Rapcsak, Polster, Comer, & Rubens, 1994;Venneri et al, 2000). Right sided frontoparietal brain damage has also been more commonly aligned with a range of neuropsychiatric symptoms including confabulation, delusions based on autobiographical memory falsifications, delusional misidentification syndromes and persecutory states (e.g.…”

The Executive Control of Face Memory

“…In particular, several patients have been described who showed increased false recognition in retrograde memory paradigms that involved judging whether they had ever seen a novel face before, or required familiarity/fame decisions using sets of stimuli that included both famous and unfamiliar faces [61][62][63][64][65][66]. In these experimental situations, the spurious sense of familiarity triggered by novel faces was occasionally accompanied by the retrieval of false biographic information resulting in frank misidentifications.…”

“…Note that the cognitive requirements of retrograde face memory paradigms are similar to what people must do to reach recognition decisions in everyday life: assess the familiarity of the face and attempt to retrieve unique, identity-specific contextual information about the person encountered. In fact, patients with frontal lobe damage sometimes demonstrate false recognition/misidentification in reallife settings by mistaking unfamiliar individuals for famous people or personal acquaintances [61][62][63]81,82].…”

“…The patients' willingness to uncritically accept false and often implausible identity-specific contextual information is consistent with the proposed impairment of executive memory monitoring and verification functions. Additional evidence of defective monitoring comes from observations that frontal patients with false recognition/misidentification exhibit anosognosia for their face memory impairment and have difficulty judging the accuracy of their recognition decisions [56,[61][62][63].…”

“…While memory loss for familiar faces is associated with temporal lobe lesions, false recognition and misidentification of unfamiliar faces is observed in patients with damage to prefrontal cortex [61][62][63][64][65][66]. In order to explore the cognitive mechanisms responsible for these memory distortions, in this paper we review pertinent neuropsychological findings from two subject populations with increased susceptibility to false facial recognition: patients with focal frontal lobe lesions and normal elderly individuals experiencing an age-related decline in frontal executive function.…”