Tsantani Maria, Gray Katie L H, Cook Richard
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK.
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, UK.
Cortex. 2020 Sep;130:318-326. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2020.06.003. Epub 2020 Jun 26.
The nature of the perceptual deficit seen in developmental prosopagnosia remains poorly understood. One possibility is that these individuals experience face recognition difficulties because they fail to process faces holistically; they may be less able to analyze distal regions in parallel and therefore struggle to integrate information from different regions into a unified perceptual whole. Consequently, developmental prosopagnosics may be forced to base perceptual decisions on a slow, effortful piecemeal analysis of local facial features. In the present study, we sought to test this view by comparing the face recognition of developmental prosopagnosics and typical observers under two viewing conditions: when target faces were briefly presented in their entirety, and when they were inspected region-by-region through a dynamic aperture. If developmental prosopagnosics are forced to base perceptual decisions on information accumulated from a serial piecemeal analysis, one would expect little if any decrement in performance when target faces are viewed through apertures. Contrary to this prediction, however, developmental prosopagnosics showed strong aperture effects comparable with typical observers; their perceptual decisions were more accurate in the whole-face condition than when targets were viewed through the aperture. As expected, the developmental prosopagnosics were less accurate than typical controls when judging briefly presented faces shown in their entirety. Strikingly, however, they were also less able to accumulate perceptual evidence from a serial region-by-region analysis, than typical observers. Our results suggest that the perceptual problems seen in this population arise from imprecise descriptions of local regions, not aberrant holistic processing.
人们对发展性面孔失认症中所见的感知缺陷的本质仍知之甚少。一种可能性是，这些个体在人脸识别方面存在困难，因为他们无法整体地处理面孔；他们可能不太能够并行分析远端区域，因此难以将来自不同区域的信息整合为一个统一的感知整体。因此，发展性面孔失认症患者可能被迫基于对面部局部特征的缓慢、费力的逐个分析来做出感知决策。在本研究中，我们试图通过比较发展性面孔失认症患者和典型观察者在两种观察条件下的人脸识别来检验这一观点：当目标面孔完整地短暂呈现时，以及当通过动态孔径逐个区域检查时。如果发展性面孔失认症患者被迫基于从串行逐个分析中积累的信息来做出感知决策，那么当通过孔径观察目标面孔时，人们预计其表现几乎不会有任何下降。然而，与这一预测相反，发展性面孔失认症患者表现出与典型观察者相当的强烈孔径效应；他们在全脸条件下的感知决策比通过孔径观察目标时更准确。正如预期的那样，发展性面孔失认症患者在判断完整呈现的短暂呈现面孔时比典型对照组更不准确。然而，令人惊讶的是，与典型观察者相比，他们也更难以从串行的逐个区域分析中积累感知证据。我们的结果表明，在这一人群中所见的感知问题源于对局部区域的不精确描述，而非异常的整体处理。
