Department of Psychology, Bournemouth University, UK.
College of Health and Life Sciences, Division of Psychology, Brunel University, UK.
Cognition. 2019 Nov;192:104031. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104031. Epub 2019 Jul 24.
A prevailing debate in the psychological literature concerns the domain-specificity of the face recognition system, where evidence from typical and neurological participants has been interpreted as evidence that faces are "special". Although several studies have investigated the same question in cases of developmental prosopagnosia, the vast majority of this evidence has recently been discounted due to methodological concerns. This leaves an uncomfortable void in the literature, restricting our understanding of the typical and atypical development of the face recognition system. The current study addressed this issue in 40 individuals with developmental prosopagnosia, completing a sequential same/different face and biological (hands) and non-biological (houses) object matching task, with upright and inverted conditions. Findings support domain-specific accounts of face-processing for both hands and houses: while significant correlations emerged between all the object categories, no condition correlated with performance in the upright faces condition. Further, a categorical analysis demonstrated that, when face matching was impaired, object matching skills were classically dissociated in six out of 15 individuals (four for both categories). These findings provide evidence about domain-specificity in developmental disorders of face recognition, and present a theoretically-driven means of partitioning developmental prosopagnosia.
在心理学文献中,一个流行的争论涉及到面部识别系统的领域特异性,来自典型和神经参与者的证据被解释为面部是“特殊的”的证据。尽管有几项研究在发展性面孔失认症的病例中调查了同样的问题,但由于方法上的考虑,最近绝大多数证据都被否定了。这在文献中留下了一个令人不安的空白,限制了我们对面部识别系统的典型和非典型发展的理解。本研究在 40 名发育性面孔失认症患者中解决了这个问题,他们完成了一个连续的相同/不同面孔和生物(手)和非生物(房子)物体匹配任务,有直立和倒置两种条件。研究结果支持了对手和房子的面部处理的领域特异性解释:虽然所有物体类别之间都出现了显著的相关性,但没有一个条件与直立面孔条件下的表现相关。此外,分类分析表明,当面孔匹配受损时,在 15 名个体中的 6 名(4 名同时对两个类别)中,物体匹配技能经典地分离。这些发现为面部识别发育障碍中的领域特异性提供了证据,并提出了一种理论驱动的方法来划分发育性面孔失认症。