Verstichel P
Service de neurologie, Centre hospitalier intercommunal, 40, avenue de Verdun-94010 Créteil.
Bull Acad Natl Med. 2001;185(3):537-49; discussion 550-3.
We report three observations of patients who suffered from impaired face recognition following cerebral lesions. Two had classical prosopagnosia, resulting from bilateral in one case and right unilateral occipito-temporal in the other. They could not differentiate famous face from unknown ones, and did not feel any familiarity. The third patient has a normal feeling of knowing, could distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar faces, but was unable to evoke any biographical information about the personalities. Prosopagnosic patients demonstrated, in an experimental condition of learning face-name pairs, implicit knowledge. We assume that these capacities were dependent of the activation of networks coding familiar faces in memory. Mental imagery of faces were normal in theses two cases. In addition, stimulation of mental imagery in the first patient improved implicit knowledge in forced choice tasks. These cases throws a light on the respective role of each hemisphere in face recognition. The right hemisphere is advantaged in perceptual analysis, and activates, from the perceived faces, mnestic systems which codes for previously encountered faces. It generates feeling of familiarity, probably by the way of specific systems which differs from, and completes, those allowing identification. The left hemisphere enable access to semantic-biographic knowledge in a conscious, verbal and explicit way.
我们报告了三例脑损伤后出现面部识别障碍患者的观察结果。其中两例患有典型的面孔失认症，一例是双侧病变导致，另一例是右侧枕颞叶单侧病变导致。他们无法区分名人面孔和陌生人面孔，也没有任何熟悉感。第三例患者有正常的知晓感，能够区分熟悉和不熟悉的面孔，但无法唤起任何关于这些人物的传记信息。面孔失认症患者在学习面孔-名字配对的实验条件下表现出内隐知识。我们认为这些能力依赖于记忆中编码熟悉面孔的网络的激活。这两例患者的面孔心理意象正常。此外，对第一例患者的心理意象进行刺激，在强制选择任务中改善了内隐知识。这些病例揭示了每个半球在面孔识别中的各自作用。右半球在感知分析方面具有优势，从感知到的面孔激活编码先前遇到面孔的记忆系统。它可能通过与允许识别的系统不同且互补的特定系统产生熟悉感。左半球能够以有意识、言语和明确的方式获取语义-传记知识。
