Towler John R, Morgan Daniel, Davies-Thompson Jodie
School of Psychology, Faculty of Medicine, Human & Health Sciences, Swansea University, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK.
Brain Sci. 2024 Aug 15;14(8):815. doi: 10.3390/brainsci14080815.
Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DP) experience severe face memory deficits that are often accompanied by impairments in face perception. Images of human facial features are better discriminated between when they are presented in the locations on the visual field that they typically appear in while viewing human faces in daily life, than in locations which they do not typically appear (i.e., better performance for eyes in the upper visual field, and better performance for mouths in the lower visual field). These feature-to-location tuning effects (FLEs) can be explained by a retinotopically organised visual statistical learning mechanism. We had a large group of DP participants (N = 64), a control group (N = 74) and a group of individuals with a mild form of DP (N = 58) complete a single-feature discrimination task to determine whether face perception deficits in DP can be accounted for by an impairment in face feature-to-location tuning. The results showed that individuals with DP did not have significant FLEs, suggesting a marked impairment in the underlying visual statistical learning mechanism. In contrast, the mild DP group showed normal FLE effects which did not differ from the control group. Both DP groups had impaired single-feature processing (SFP) as compared to the control group. We also examined the effects of age on FLEs and SFP.
患有发展性面孔失认症（DP）的个体存在严重的面孔记忆缺陷，且常常伴有面孔感知障碍。与在日常生活中观看人脸时它们通常不会出现的位置呈现的情况相比，当人类面部特征图像呈现在它们在视野中通常出现的位置时，更容易被区分（即上视野中的眼睛表现更好，下视野中的嘴巴表现更好）。这些特征到位置的调谐效应（FLEs）可以通过视网膜拓扑组织的视觉统计学习机制来解释。我们让一大组DP参与者（N = 64）、一个对照组（N = 74）和一组患有轻度DP的个体（N = 58）完成一项单特征辨别任务，以确定DP中的面孔感知缺陷是否可以由面孔特征到位置调谐的损伤来解释。结果表明，患有DP的个体没有显著的FLEs，这表明潜在的视觉统计学习机制存在明显损伤。相比之下，轻度DP组表现出正常的FLE效应，与对照组没有差异。与对照组相比，两个DP组的单特征处理（SFP）都受损。我们还研究了年龄对FLEs和SFP的影响。
