[Unilateral cerebral lesion and disturbance of face perception. Specificity of the deficit? (author's transl)].

Twenty normal subjects, twenty subjects with a left hemispheric lesion and ten patients with a right-side lesion were tested for visual perception of various categories of complex, not readily verbalizable stimuli : human faces, dog faces, "faces" of motor vehicles, facades of houses. The purpose of the work was to explore the theory that the right hemisphere accomplishes treatment processes specific to faces presented the right way round. A classification pre-test and identification pre-test were followed by a test in which the patient had to identify a model in a group of stimuli of different categories, the material being presented either the right way or the wrong way round. The results bear out the reports in the literature ; they show particular fragility on the part of subjects with right-side lesions confronted with human faces. The data also bear out the theory of specificity, provided that the "face" concept is taken to include all living faces (dogs and human beings).