Department of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology, University of Verona, Lungadige Porta Vittoria 17, 37129 Verona, Italy.
Neuropsychologia. 2012 Jan;50(1):104-17. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.11.004. Epub 2011 Nov 12.
Conspicuous deficits in face recognition characterize prosopagnosia. Information on whether agnosic deficits may extend to non-facial body parts is lacking. Here we report the neuropsychological description of FM, a patient affected by a complete deficit in face recognition in the presence of mild clinical signs of visual object agnosia. His deficit involves both overt and covert recognition of faces (i.e. recognition of familiar faces, but also categorization of faces for gender or age) as well as the visual mental imagery of faces. By means of a series of matching-to-sample tasks we investigated: (i) a possible association between prosopagnosia and disorders in visual body perception; (ii) the effect of the emotional content of stimuli on the visual discrimination of faces, bodies and objects; (iii) the existence of a dissociation between identity recognition and the emotional discrimination of faces and bodies. Our results document, for the first time, the co-occurrence of body agnosia, i.e. the visual inability to discriminate body forms and body actions, and prosopagnosia. Moreover, the results show better performance in the discrimination of emotional face and body expressions with respect to body identity and neutral actions. Since FM's lesions involve bilateral fusiform areas, it is unlikely that the amygdala-temporal projections explain the relative sparing of emotion discrimination performance. Indeed, the emotional content of the stimuli did not improve the discrimination of their identity. The results hint at the existence of two segregated brain networks involved in identity and emotional discrimination that are at least partially shared by face and body processing.
面孔失认症的特征是明显的面孔识别缺陷。关于认知障碍是否可能扩展到非面部身体部位的信息尚不清楚。在这里，我们报告了 FM 的神经心理学描述，FM 是一名患者，存在严重的面孔识别缺陷，但只有轻微的视觉物体认知障碍临床症状。他的缺陷既包括对面孔的显性和隐性识别（即识别熟悉的面孔，也包括对面孔的性别或年龄进行分类），也包括对面孔的视觉心理意象。通过一系列匹配样本任务，我们研究了：（i）面孔失认症和视觉身体感知障碍之间是否存在关联；（ii）刺激的情绪内容对面孔、身体和物体的视觉辨别能力的影响；（iii）身份识别和面孔及身体的情绪辨别之间是否存在分离。我们的研究结果首次证明了身体失认症（即视觉上无法区分身体形态和身体动作）和面孔失认症的共同发生。此外，与身体身份和中性动作相比，结果显示出在情绪面孔和身体表达的辨别方面的更好表现。由于 FM 的损伤涉及双侧梭状回区域，因此杏仁核-颞叶投射不太可能解释情绪辨别能力相对保留的原因。实际上，刺激的情绪内容并没有改善其身份的辨别。结果提示存在两个分离的大脑网络，分别涉及身份和情绪辨别，这些网络至少部分与面孔和身体处理共享。
