de Gelder B, Rouw R
Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Neuropsychologia. 2000;38(9):1271-9. doi: 10.1016/s0028-3932(00)00039-7.
Selective impairment in recognition of faces (prosopagnosia) has been advanced as an argument for a brain module dedicated to face processing and focusing on the specific configural properties of faces. Loss of the inversion effect supposedly strengthened the argument ([10]: de Gelder B, Bachoud-Levi AC, Degos JD. Inversion superiority in visual agnosia may be common to a variety of orientation polarised objects besides faces. Vision Research, 1998;38:2855-61; [20]: Farah MJ, Wilson K, Drain H, Tanaka J. The inverted face inversion effect in prosopagnosia: Evidence for mandatory, face-specific perceptual mechanisms. Vision Research 1995b;35:2089-93). The present study of prosopagnosic patient LH reports that he has lost the normal pattern of superior performance with upright faces and objects and shows instead paradoxical inversion effect for faces but also for objects. Experiment 2 investigated whether LH's use of features based route for processing upright objects would be hindered by the whole-based encoding when processing upright objects. The data show the same context effect for objects as was found for faces. Therefore the inversion effect does not present decisive evidence for the existence of a face module. Moreover, the importance of configuration-based recognition known to be crucial for face processing, must also be taken seriously for object recognition.
对面孔识别的选择性损伤（面孔失认症）已被提出，作为存在一个专门用于面孔加工并关注面孔特定构型属性的脑模块的论据。倒置效应的丧失据称强化了这一论据（[10]：德·盖尔德B、巴胡德 - 列维AC、德戈斯JD。视觉失认症中的倒置优势可能除面孔外还适用于各种方向极化的物体。《视觉研究》，1998年；38：2855 - 61；[20]：法拉赫MJ、威尔逊K、德雷恩H、田中J。面孔失认症中的倒置面孔倒置效应：强制性、面孔特异性知觉机制的证据。《视觉研究》1995b年；35：2089 - 93）。本对面孔失认症患者LH的研究报告称，他失去了对面孔和物体正立时表现更优的正常模式，反而对面孔和物体都表现出反常的倒置效应。实验2研究了在加工正立物体时，LH基于特征的加工路径是否会受到整体编码的阻碍。数据显示物体的情境效应与面孔的相同。因此，倒置效应并不能为面孔模块的存在提供决定性证据。此外，已知对面孔加工至关重要的基于构型的识别的重要性，在物体识别中也必须得到重视。
