Young A W, Ellis H D
Lancaster University, England.
Brain Cogn. 1989 Jan;9(1):16-47. doi: 10.1016/0278-2626(89)90042-0.
K.D. has been unable to recognize people's faces since sustaining cerebral injury in infancy. Investigation of this disorder carried out when K.D. was aged 8 to 11 years showed that although her basic visual abilities were impaired, they were no poorer than those of other children who recognized faces without difficulty. K.D. had learned to read, but had not regained ability to recognize people's faces; instead she relied primarily on voices as a cue to person recognition. There was no evidence of any degree of overt or covert recognition of familiar faces, and K.D. also experienced problems in visual object recognition. She could, however, classify a visual input as a face, was able to perceive and imitate facial expressions, and was able to perform face matching tasks to an extent limited by her use of a feature by feature matching strategy. It is suggested that K.D.'s impairment affected higher order perceptual abilities, and is in a number of respects comparable to the impairments found in adult prosopagnosic patients.
K.D.自婴儿期脑部受伤后就一直无法识别他人的面孔。在K.D. 8至11岁时对这种病症进行的调查显示，尽管她的基本视觉能力受损，但并不比其他能轻松识别面孔的孩子差。K.D.学会了阅读，但仍未恢复识别他人面孔的能力；相反，她主要依靠声音作为识别他人的线索。没有证据表明她对熟悉面孔有任何程度的显性或隐性识别，而且K.D.在视觉物体识别方面也存在问题。然而，她能够将视觉输入分类为面孔，能够感知和模仿面部表情，并且能够在一定程度上执行面孔匹配任务，其程度受限于她使用的逐个特征匹配策略。研究表明，K.D.的损伤影响了高阶感知能力，在许多方面与成年面孔失认症患者的损伤情况相当。
