Impaired face and body perception in developmental prosopagnosia

Abstract

Prosopagnosia is a deficit in face recognition in the presence of relatively normal object recognition. Together with older lesion studies, recent brain-imaging results provide evidence for the closely related representations of faces and objects and, more recently, for brain areas sensitive to faces and bodies. This evidence raises the issue of whether developmental prosopagnosics may also have an impairment in encoding bodies. We investigated the first stages of face, body, and object perception in four developmental prosopagnosics by comparing event-related potentials to canonically and upsidedown presented stimuli. Normal configural encoding was absent in three of four developmental prosopagnosics for faces at the P1 and for both faces and bodies at the N170 component. Our results demonstrate that prosopagnosics do not have this normal processing routine readily available for faces or bodies. A profound face recognition deficit characteristic of developmental prosopagnosia may not necessarily originate in a category-specific face recognition deficit in the initial stages of development. It may also have its roots in anomalous processing of the configuration, a visual routine that is important for other stimuli besides faces. Faces and bodies trigger configuration-based visual strategies that are crucial in initial stages of stimulus encoding but also serve to bootstrap the acquisition of more feature-based visual skills that progressively build up in the course of development.face configuration ͉ inversion effect ͉ N170

The Cognitive and Neural Basis of Developmental Prosopagnosia

“…In experiments with small sample sizes, facesensitive N170 components were present in some individuals with DP and absent in others (Bentin et al, 1999;Bentin, DeGutis, D'Esposito, & Robertson, 2007;Kress & Daum, 2003;Harris, Duchaine, & Nakayama, 2005;Righart & De Gelder, 2007;Minnebusch, Suchan, Ramon, & Daum, 2007;Rivolta, Palermo, Schmalzl, & Williams, 2012;Németh, Zimmer, Schweinberger, Vakli, & Kovács, 2014). These findings underline the apparent heterogeneity of DP, and suggest that face recognition deficits in DP may have different causes in different individuals.…”

Neuropsychological mechanisms of visual face and body perception

“…Given the closely related representations of faces and bodies (Peelen and Downing, 2007a;Schwarzlose et al, 2005), DP individuals may also have difficulties with configural body processing. This hypothesis has been supported by a recent study of altered ERPs evoked by both faces and bodies in DP subjects (Righart and de Gelder, 2007). Configural processing may thus be relevant for a range of visual stimuli in addition to faces.…”

“…3). Body inversion did not have a significant effect on P1 latency and amplitude (Righart and de Gelder, 2007). Both studies used photographs representing the whole body and faces were masked to minimize the involvement of face processing.…”

Standing up for the body. Recent progress in uncovering the networks involved in the perception of bodies and bodily expressions

“…The deflections in the Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) of face and body perception show several similarities (Stekelenburg and Gliga and Dehaene-Lambertz, 2005;Meeren et al, 2005;Thierry et al, 2006;Righart and de Gelder, 2007). ERPs for faces as well as for bodies show a P1 and a prominent N1 component with similar scalp topography (Stekelenburg and .…”