Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Dartmouth College, USA.
Cognition. 2023 Sep;238:105469. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105469. Epub 2023 May 20.
Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DPs) experience severe and lifelong deficits recognising faces, but whether their deficits are selective to the processing of face identity or extend to the processing of face expression remains unclear. Clarifying this issue is important for understanding DP impairments and advancing theories of face processing. We compared identity and expression processing in a large sample of DPs (N = 124) using three different matching tasks that each assessed identity and expression processing with identical experimental formats. We ran each task in upright and inverted orientations and we measured inversion effects to assess the integrity of upright-specific face processes. We report three main results. First, DPs showed large deficits at discriminating identity but only subtle deficits at discriminating expression. Second, DPs showed a reduced inversion effect for identity but a normal inversion effect for expression. Third, DPs' performance on the expression tasks were linked to autism traits, but their performance on the identity tasks were not. These results constitute several dissociations between identity and expression processing in DP, and they are consistent with the view that the core impairment in DP is highly selective to identity.
个体发展性面孔失认症（DPs）患者在识别面孔方面存在严重且终身的缺陷，但他们的缺陷是仅限于对面孔身份的处理，还是扩展到对面孔表情的处理尚不清楚。澄清这个问题对于理解 DPs 的损伤以及推进面孔处理理论非常重要。我们使用三种不同的匹配任务，在一个较大的 DPs 样本（N=124）中比较了身份和表情处理，这些任务都使用相同的实验格式评估身份和表情处理。我们在直立和倒置方向上运行每个任务，并测量反转效应以评估垂直特定面孔过程的完整性。我们报告了三个主要结果。首先，DPs 在辨别身份方面存在较大缺陷，但在辨别表情方面只有细微缺陷。其次，DPs 在身份方面的反转效应减小，但在表情方面的反转效应正常。第三，DPs 在表情任务上的表现与自闭症特征有关，但他们在身份任务上的表现则无关。这些结果在 DPs 中构成了身份和表情处理之间的几个分离，并且与 DPs 的核心损伤高度选择性地针对身份的观点一致。
