Malaspina Manuela, Albonico Andrea, Toneatto Carlo, Daini Roberta
Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università degli studi di Milano-Bicocca.
Neuropsychology. 2017 Jul;31(5):546-563. doi: 10.1037/neu0000362. Epub 2017 Apr 3.
The lack of inversion effect for face recognition in congenital prosopagnosia (CP) is consistent with the hypothesis of a failure in holistic processing. However, although CPs' abnormal gaze behavior for upright faces has already been demonstrated, neither their scanning strategy for inverted faces, nor the possibility that their abnormal gaze behavior with upright faces is because of reasons other than the holistic deficit have been investigated yet.
We recorded the eye movements of a congenital prosopagnosic and a control group during the encoding of unknown faces, objects, and flowers. Two types of stimuli (faces and objects) were presented upright and inverted.
CPs explored upright and inverted faces in the same way (i.e., similar number of fixations of the same duration and similarly distributed), whereas controls increased the number of fixations and their duration during the presentation of inverted faces. By contrast, the 2 groups showed a similar inversion effect during the encoding of objects. Finally, CPs showed anomalous exploration of within-class objects (i.e., flowers) and impairment in subordinate-level object discrimination.
Our results demonstrate that: (a) CPs use the same part-based strategy in encoding both upright and inverted faces, suggesting a possible interpretation of the lack of inversion effect in this population; (b) CPs' lack of inversion effect is face-specific and does not affect objects; (c) however, CPs' deficit seems not to be limited to faces, and to extend to individual-item recognition within a class. (PsycINFO Database Record
先天性面孔失认症（CP）中人脸识别缺乏倒置效应，这与整体加工失败的假设一致。然而，尽管已经证明CP患者对正立面孔存在异常注视行为，但他们对倒置面孔的扫描策略，以及他们对正立面孔的异常注视行为是否由于整体缺陷以外的原因导致，尚未得到研究。
我们记录了一名先天性面孔失认症患者和一个对照组在对陌生面孔、物体和花朵进行编码时的眼动情况。呈现了两种类型的刺激（面孔和物体），包括正立和倒置的。
CP患者以相同的方式探索正立和倒置的面孔（即，相同持续时间的注视次数相似且分布相似），而对照组在呈现倒置面孔时增加了注视次数和持续时间。相比之下，两组在物体编码过程中表现出相似的倒置效应。最后，CP患者对同类物体（即花朵）表现出异常探索，并且在从属水平的物体辨别方面存在损害。
我们的结果表明：（a）CP患者在编码正立和倒置面孔时使用相同的基于部分的策略，这为该人群中缺乏倒置效应提供了一种可能的解释；（b）CP患者缺乏倒置效应是面孔特异性的，并不影响物体；（c）然而，CP患者的缺陷似乎不仅限于面孔，还扩展到了类内单个项目的识别。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
