Lesions of the fusiform face area impair perception of facial configuration in prosopagnosia

Abstract

Perception of facial configuration is impaired in patients with prosopagnosia whose lesions involve the right fusiform gyrus. This deficit is especially manifest when attention must be distributed across numerous facial elements. It does not occur with more anterior bilateral temporal lesions. Loss of this ability may contribute to the recognition defect in some forms of prosopagnosia.

Deficits in face perception in the amnestic form of mild cognitive impairment

“…However, cerebral achromatopsia from lingual and fusiform lesions usually affects hue and saturation discrimination, with preservation of lightness perception [30][31][32]. Indeed, this was the rationale for choosing to modulate lightness rather than color in our paradigm [28]. In prosopagnosic patients, difficulty with perceiving eye lightness is unusual and can be associated with a more general deficit in lightness perception [33] and more extensive collateral damage to peri-striate cortex [28], hence in our aMCI cohort, it is also possible that a deficit in discriminating eye color may indicate more diffuse involvement of visual cortex in addition to fusiform damage.…”

“…Functional imaging studies in healthy subjects have identified a fusiform face area (FFA) in the lateral aspect of the fusiform gyrus that is activated more by faces than other objects [24][25][26], and which may be involved in discriminating the structural aspects of faces relevant to facial identity [27]. Prosopagnosic patients with right fusiform lesions are impaired in the perception of facial structure, especially the configuration or spatial arrangement of features within a face [28].…”

“…However, to our knowledge, this has not been studied in aMCI. In this report we investigated face discrimination in a cohort of patients with aMCI, using a method that has shown perceptual abnormalities in prosopagnosic patients with damage to the right fusiform gyrus [28].…”

Configural processing in autism and its relationship to face processing

“…The relationship between the ability to configure local elements and face processing is well-established in other populations. There are several studies showing that individuals with prosopagnosia perform poorly on tasks that require the integration of perceptual information (Barton et al, 2002) and integrative agnosic patients who are impaired at grouping information to form a global shape may show concurrent problems in object and face recognition (Behrmann & Kimchi, 2003;Ricci, Vaishnavi, & Chatterjee, 1999). Moreover, individuals who are congenitally prosopagnosic (CP), with no identifiable neural substrate that gives rise to this behavioral alteration, are impaired on the global/local task and show a profile similar to that of the autistic individuals on the very same few/many experiment conducted here (Behrmann et al, 2005).…”

“…Indeed, individuals with integrative visual agnosia who experience difficulty in deriving configural information, are also impaired both at recognizing known faces and at discriminating novel faces. The reverse finding is also reported: individuals who are impaired at face processing either as a result of a brain damage (acquired prosopagnosia) (Barton, Press, Keenan, & O'Connor, 2002;Behrmann & Kimchi, 2003) or as a result of a congenital problem are also impaired at extracting configurations from local elements (Behrmann et al, in pressBehrmann, Avidan, Marotta, & Kimchi, 2005;Le Grand, Mondloch, Maurer, & Brent, 2004). A further indication of the relationship between faces and configurations comes from comparisons of performance on upright versus inverted faces, relative to objects.…”