Université catholique de Louvain, Institute of Research in Psychology (IPSY), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Neuropsychologia. 2011 Sep;49(11):3145-50. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.07.010. Epub 2011 Jul 23.
Gaze-contingency is a method traditionally used to investigate the perceptual span in reading by selectively revealing/masking a portion of the visual field in real time. Introducing this approach in face perception research showed that the performance pattern of a brain-damaged patient with acquired prosopagnosia (PS) in a face matching task was reversed, as compared to normal observers: the patient showed almost no further decrease of performance when only one facial part (eye, mouth, nose, etc.) was available at a time (foveal window condition, forcing part-based analysis), but a very large impairment when the fixated part was selectively masked (mask condition, promoting holistic perception) (Van Belle, De Graef, Verfaillie, Busigny, & Rossion, 2010a; Van Belle, De Graef, Verfaillie, Rossion, & Lefèvre, 2010b). Here we tested the same manipulation in a recently reported case of pure prosopagnosia (GG) with unilateral right hemisphere damage (Busigny, Joubert, Felician, Ceccaldi, & Rossion, 2010). Contrary to normal observers, GG was also significantly more impaired with a mask than with a window, demonstrating impairment with holistic face perception. Together with our previous study, these observations support a generalized account of acquired prosopagnosia as a critical impairment of holistic (individual) face perception, implying that this function is a key element of normal human face recognition. Furthermore, the similar behavioral pattern of the two patients despite different lesion localizations supports a distributed network view of the neural face processing structures, suggesting that the key function of human face processing, namely holistic perception of individual faces, requires the activity of several brain areas of the right hemisphere and their mutual connectivity.
注视条件是一种传统的方法，用于通过实时选择性地揭示/掩盖部分视野来研究阅读中的感知范围。在面孔感知研究中引入这种方法表明，患有后天性面孔失认症（PS）的脑损伤患者在面孔匹配任务中的表现模式与正常观察者相反：与正常观察者相比，当一次只有一个面部部分（眼睛、嘴巴、鼻子等）可用时，患者的表现几乎没有进一步下降（中央凹窗口条件，强制进行基于部分的分析），但当注视的部分被选择性地掩蔽时，患者的表现会受到很大的损害（掩蔽条件，促进整体感知）（Van Belle、De Graef、Verfaillie、Busigny 和 Rossion，2010a；Van Belle、De Graef、Verfaillie、Rossion 和 Lefèvre，2010b）。在这里，我们在最近报道的一例单侧右侧大脑半球损伤的纯面孔失认症（GG）病例中测试了相同的操作（Busigny、Joubert、Felician、Ceccaldi 和 Rossion，2010）。与正常观察者相反，与窗口相比，GG 患者在掩蔽条件下的表现也明显更差，这表明他们的整体面孔感知受损。结合我们之前的研究，这些观察结果支持后天性面孔失认症的一般解释，即整体（个体）面孔感知的严重损伤，这意味着这种功能是正常人类面孔识别的关键要素。此外，尽管两位患者的损伤部位不同，但他们的行为模式相似，这支持了神经面孔处理结构的分布式网络观点，表明人类面孔处理的关键功能，即个体面孔的整体感知，需要右侧大脑的几个脑区的活动及其相互连接。
