Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N3AR, UK.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2007 Jun;2(2):104-13. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsm003.
Faces are represented in a more configural or holistic manner than other objects. Substantial evidence indicates that this representation results from face-specific mechanisms, but some have argued that it is produced by configural mechanisms that can be applied to many objects including words. The face-specific hypothesis predicts that non-face configural processes will often be normal in prosopagnosic subjects, whereas the domain-general configural hypothesis predicts they will be deficient on all configural tasks. Although the weight of the evidence favors the face-specific hypothesis, a recent study reopened this issue when it was found that three out of five developmental prosopagnosics showed a larger local processing bias than controls in a global-local task (i.e. a Navon task). To examine this issue more thoroughly we tested a significantly larger sample of prosopagnosics (14 participants) who had severe face memory and face perception deficits. In contrast to the previous report, the developmental prosopagnosics performed normally in the global-local task. Like controls, they showed a typical global advantage and typical global-to-local consistency effects. The results demonstrate that the configural processing required by the Navon task is dissociable from face configural processing.
面孔以更具结构或整体的方式呈现，而不是其他物体。大量证据表明，这种表示形式源于特定于面孔的机制，但也有人认为，它是由可以应用于包括单词在内的许多物体的结构机制产生的。特定于面孔的假设预测，非面孔结构过程通常在面孔失认症患者中是正常的，而域一般性结构假设预测，它们在所有结构任务中都会不足。尽管证据的权重有利于特定于面孔的假设，但最近的一项研究重新提出了这个问题，因为发现在一个全局-局部任务（即纳冯任务）中，五名发育性面孔失认症患者中有三名比对照组表现出更大的局部加工偏向。为了更彻底地研究这个问题，我们测试了一个更大的面孔失认症样本（14 名参与者），他们有严重的面孔记忆和面孔知觉缺陷。与之前的报告相反，发育性面孔失认症患者在全局-局部任务中表现正常。与对照组一样，他们表现出典型的全局优势和典型的全局到局部一致性效应。结果表明，纳冯任务所需的结构处理与面孔结构处理是可分离的。
