Recognizing and identifying people: A neuropsychological review

Abstract

Recognizing people is a classic example of a cognitive function that involves multiple processing stages and parallel routes of information. Neuropsychological data have provided important evidence for models of this process, particularly from case reports; however, the quality and extent of the data varies widely between studies. In this review we first discuss the requirements and logical basis of the types of neuropsychological evidence to support conclusions about the modules in this process. We then survey the adequacy of the current body of reports to address two key issues. First is the question of which cognitive operation generates a sense of familiarity: the current debate revolves around whether familiarity arises in modality-specific recognition units or later amodal processes. Key evidence on this point comes from the search for dissociations between familiarity for faces, voices and names. The second question is whether lesions can differentially affect the abilities to link diverse sources of person information (e.g. face, voice, name, biographic data). Dissociations of these linkages may favour a distributed-only model of the organization of semantic knowledge, whereas a ‘person-hub’ model would predict uniform impairments of all linkages. While we conclude that there is reasonable evidence for dissociations in name, voice and face familiarity in regards to the first question, the evidence for or against dissociated linkages between information stores in regards to the second is tenuous at best. We identify deficiencies in the current literature that should motivate and inform the design of future studies.

Prosopagnosia: current perspectives

“…This percept is matched to stores of face memories, termed “face recognition units”, to determine whether the face has been seen before. Some argue that a correct match at this stage produces a feeling of familiarity with the face 19–21. A correct match also activates a “person identity node”, which allows access to semantic information and the name of the person to whom the face belongs.…”

“…Second, new theories have proposed that words and faces, two visual classes for which literate humans have great expertise, share and compete for resources, leading to predictions that prosopagnosic subjects may have subtle deficits in word processing 60,61. Third, questions have arisen as to whether some prosopagnosic subjects may actually have a multimodal problem in recognizing people 19,62,63. If so, they should also have impairment of recognition of people by voice and name; however, voice recognition has seldom been objectively evaluated in prosopagnosia.…”

Dynamic neural architecture for social knowledge retrieval

“…However, little is known about how and where such "person knowledge" is represented, stored, and retrieved in the brain. This inquiry is challenging because person knowledge is highly multimodal and multifaceted, being linked to both abstract features such as personality and social status as well as more concrete features such as eye color; in addition, familiar individuals are associated with detailed episodic and semantic memories (e.g., memories of shared experiences and biographic information) (1,2). The neural circuit for person knowledge must therefore have the ability to combine multiple sources of information into an abstract representation accessible from multiplicative cues.…”

Cross-modal processing of voices and faces in developmental prosopagnosia and developmental phonagnosia

“…Importantly responses in the FFA appear to support the perceptual processing of voices (Blank, Kiebel, & von Kriegstein, 2015;Schall et al, 2013), providing evidence that the face and voice interact to support identity processing at earlier stages of processing than previously assumed (Bruce & Young, 1986;Burton, Bruce, & Johnston, 1990;Ellis, Jones, & Mosdell, 1997). More traditional models of person recognition propose that the face and voice undergo extensive unisensory processing and only interact to support recognition at supramodal, i.e., post-perceptual, stages of processing (Burton et al, 1990;Bruce & Young, 1986;see Blank, Wieland, and von Kriegstein, 2014;Barton and Corrow, 2016;Quaranta et al, 2016, for more recent reviews of these models).…”