Fisher Katie, Towler John, Rossion Bruno, Eimer Martin
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, UK; UCL Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, UK.
Department of Psychology, College of Human and Health Sciences, Swansea University, Swansea, UK.
Cortex. 2020 Dec;133:76-102. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2020.09.008. Epub 2020 Sep 29.
We investigated selective impairments of visual identity discrimination in developmental prosopagnosia (DP), using a fast periodic identity oddball stimulation paradigm with electroencephalography (EEG). In Experiment 1, neural responses to unfamiliar face identity changes were strongly attenuated for individuals with DP as compared to Control participants, to the same extent for upright and inverted faces. This reduction of face identity discrimination responses, which was confirmed in Experiment 2, provides direct evidence for deficits in the visual processing of unfamiliar facial identity in DP. Importantly, Experiment 2 demonstrated that DPs showed attenuated neural responses to identity oddballs not only with face images, but also with non-face images (cars). This result strongly suggests that rapid identity-related visual processing impairments in DP are not restricted to faces, but also affect familiar classes of non-face stimuli. Visual discrimination deficits in DP do not appear to be face-specific. To account for these findings, we propose a new account of DP as a domain-general deficit in rapid visual discrimination.
我们使用快速周期性身份异常刺激范式结合脑电图（EEG），研究了发育性面孔失认症（DP）中视觉身份辨别能力的选择性损伤。在实验1中，与对照组参与者相比，DP个体对不熟悉面孔身份变化的神经反应明显减弱，对于正立和倒置面孔的减弱程度相同。这种面孔身份辨别反应的减少在实验2中得到了证实，为DP中不熟悉面孔身份的视觉处理缺陷提供了直接证据。重要的是，实验2表明，DP个体不仅对脸部图像的身份异常刺激表现出减弱的神经反应，对非脸部图像（汽车）也有同样的表现。这一结果有力地表明，DP中与身份相关的快速视觉处理损伤不仅限于面孔，还会影响熟悉的非面孔刺激类别。DP中的视觉辨别缺陷似乎并非面孔特异性的。为了解释这些发现，我们提出了一种新的观点，即DP是快速视觉辨别中的一种领域一般性缺陷。
