Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Neuropsychologia. 2010 Mar;48(4):933-44. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.11.014. Epub 2009 Nov 26.
Prosopagnosia is an impairment at individualizing faces that classically follows brain damage. Several studies have reported observations supporting an impairment of holistic/configural face processing in acquired prosopagnosia. However, this issue may require more compelling evidence as the cases reported were generally patients suffering from integrative visual agnosia, and the sensitivity of the paradigms used to measure holistic/configural face processing in normal individuals remains unclear. Here we tested a well-characterized case of acquired prosopagnosia (PS) with no object recognition impairment, in five behavioral experiments (whole/part and composite face paradigms with unfamiliar faces). In all experiments, for normal observers we found that processing of a given facial feature was affected by the location and identity of the other features in a whole face configuration. In contrast, the patient's results over these experiments indicate that she encodes local facial information independently of the other features embedded in the whole facial context. These observations and a survey of the literature indicate that abnormal holistic processing of the individual face may be a characteristic hallmark of prosopagnosia following brain damage, perhaps with various degrees of severity.
面容失认症是一种个体无法识别面部的障碍，通常是由于大脑损伤引起的。多项研究报告了观察结果，支持在获得性面容失认症中存在整体/构形面部处理受损。然而，这个问题可能需要更有力的证据，因为报告的病例通常是患有综合视觉失认症的患者，而且用于测量正常个体整体/构形面部处理的范式的敏感性仍不清楚。在这里，我们在五个行为实验中测试了一个具有明确特征的获得性面容失认症患者（PS），该患者没有物体识别障碍（使用不熟悉的面孔进行整体/部分和复合面孔范式）。在所有实验中，对于正常观察者，我们发现对给定面部特征的处理受到整体面部配置中其他特征的位置和身份的影响。相比之下，患者在这些实验中的结果表明，她独立于嵌入整个面部上下文的其他特征来编码局部面部信息。这些观察结果和对文献的综述表明，大脑损伤后的面容失认症可能存在异常的整体面部处理，其严重程度可能不同。
