Université de Lorraine, CNRS, CRAN, F-54000, Nancy, France; CHRU-Nancy, Service de Neurologie, F-5400, France; Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Institute of Neuroscience, University of Louvain, Belgium.
Neuropsychologia. 2022 Aug 13;173:108278. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108278. Epub 2022 Jun 8.
Following traumatic brain injury in adulthood, Pierrette Sapey (PS) became suddenly unable to recognize the identity of people from their faces. Thanks to her remarkable recovery of general brain function, liveliness, and willingness to be tested, PS's case of prosopagnosia has been extensively studied for more than 20 years. This investigation includes hundreds of hours of behavioral data collection that provide information about the nature of human face identity recognition (FIR). Here a theory-driven extensive review of behavioral and eye movement recording studies performed with PS is presented (part I). The specificity of PS's recognition disorder to the category of faces, i.e., with preserved visual object (identity) recognition, is emphasized, arguing that isolating this impairment is necessary to define prosopagnosia, offering a unique window to understand the nature of human FIR. Studies performed with both unfamiliar and experimentally or naturally familiar faces show that PS, while being able to perceive both detailed diagnostic facial parts and a coarse global facial shape, can no longer build a relatively fine-grained holistic visual representation of a face, preventing its efficient individuation. Her mandatory part-by-part analytic behavior during FIR causes increased difficulties at extracting diagnostic cues from the crowded eye region of the face, but also from relative distances between facial parts and from 3D shape more than from surface cues. PS's impairment is interpreted here for the first time in terms of defective (access to) cortical memories of faces following brain damage, causing her impaired holistic perception of face individuality. Implications for revising standard neurofunctional models of human face recognition and evaluation of this function in neurotypical individuals are derived.
成年后因颅脑外伤，Pierrette Sapey（PS）突然无法通过面孔识别他人身份。得益于其出色的大脑整体功能恢复、活力和测试意愿，PS 的面孔失认症案例已被广泛研究了 20 多年。该研究包括数百小时的行为数据收集，提供了有关人类面孔身份识别（FIR）性质的信息。本文对 PS 的行为和眼动记录研究进行了理论驱动的广泛回顾（第一部分）。强调了 PS 识别障碍的特异性仅限于面孔类别，即保留了视觉物体（身份）识别，认为这种障碍的孤立对于定义面孔失认症是必要的，为理解人类 FIR 的本质提供了独特的视角。使用陌生和实验或自然熟悉的面孔进行的研究表明，PS 虽然能够感知详细的诊断性面部部分和粗糙的整体面部形状，但不再能够对面部进行相对精细的整体视觉表征，从而无法有效地对其进行个体识别。在 FIR 过程中，她强制性地进行部分到部分的分析行为，导致她从面部拥挤的眼部区域以及从面部各部分的相对距离和 3D 形状中提取诊断线索变得更加困难，而不是从表面线索中。本文首次从大脑损伤后（访问）皮质记忆受损的角度来解释 PS 的这种损伤，导致她对面部个体性的整体感知受损。这对修订人类面孔识别的标准神经功能模型以及评估神经典型个体的这种功能具有启示意义。
