Relative preservation of facial expression recognition in posterior cortical atrophy

Abstract

ObjectiveTo compare recognition of facial expression (FE) vs recognition of facial identity (FI) in posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), with the hypothesis that FE recognition would be relatively preserved in PCA.MethodsIn this observational study, FI and expression recognition tasks were performed by 194 participants in 4 groups, including 39 with Alzheimer disease (AD) (non-PCA), 49 with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), 15 with PCA, and 91 healthy controls. Between-group differences in test scores were compared.ResultsPatients with PCA performed worse than healthy controls in FI and emotion recognition tasks (p < 0.001 for all). Patients with PCA also performed worse than AD and bvFTD groups in FI recognition, with no difference in FE recognition.ConclusionsPatients with PCA have relatively preserved FE recognition compared to FI recognition, as seen in affective blindsight.

Functional brain connectome in posterior cortical atrophy

“…The study has some limitations. In terms of the clinical/cognitive assessment, some cognitive functions were only computed as binary variables (impaired/unimpaired) and some more ventral functions were not systematically explored, such as the facial identification (Pressman et al., 2019). Furthermore, not all patients underwent the FDG-PET scan, which lead to a small sample size for that specific analysis.…”

Update on posterior cortical atrophy

“…Two recent studies demonstrate that PCA-focused investigations can shed light on the importance of visual networks to behavior and general visual brain functions. First, a study by Pressman and colleagues [8] revealed relative preservation of facial expression versus facial identification in PCA compared to both typical AD and the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia. The authors postulated that these findings could account for the frequent observation of preserved social and emotional functions in PCA and support theories that the origins of 'affective blindsight' (i.e.…”