Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, USA.
Cognition. 2013 Oct;129(1):88-94. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.06.004. Epub 2013 Jul 12.
Does the human visual system contain perceptual mechanisms specialized for particular object categories such as faces? This question lies at the heart of a long-running debate in face perception. The face-specific hypothesis posits that face perception relies on mechanisms dedicated to faces, while the expertise hypothesis proposes that faces are processed by more generic mechanisms that operate on objects we have extended experience with. Previous studies that have addressed this question using acquired prosopagnosia are inconclusive because the non-face categories tested (e.g., cars) were not well-matched to faces in terms of visual exposure and perceptual experience. Here we compare perception of faces and bodies in four acquired prosopagnosics. Critically, we used face and body tasks that generate comparable inversion effects in controls, which indicates that our tasks engage orientation-specific perceptual mechanisms for faces and bodies to a similar extent. Three prosopagnosics were able to discriminate bodies normally despite their impairment in face perception. Moreover, they exhibited normal inversion effects for bodies, suggesting their body perception was carried out by the same mechanisms used by controls. Our findings indicate that the human visual system contains processes specialized for faces.
人类视觉系统是否包含专门用于特定物体类别的感知机制，例如面孔？这个问题是面孔感知长期争论的核心。特定面孔假说假设面孔感知依赖于专门用于面孔的机制，而专业知识假说则提出，面孔是由更通用的机制处理的，这些机制适用于我们具有丰富经验的物体。以前使用获得性面孔失认症来解决这个问题的研究没有得出明确的结论，因为所测试的非面孔类别（例如汽车）在视觉暴露和感知经验方面与面孔不匹配。在这里，我们比较了四名获得性面孔失认症患者对面孔和身体的感知。关键的是，我们使用了在对照组中产生类似反转效应的面孔和身体任务，这表明我们的任务以相似的程度吸引了特定于方向的面孔和身体感知机制。尽管三名面孔失认症患者在面孔感知方面存在障碍，但他们仍能够正常区分身体。此外，他们的身体反转效应正常，表明他们的身体感知是由与对照组相同的机制进行的。我们的发现表明，人类视觉系统包含专门用于面孔的处理过程。
