Carlesimo G A, Caltagirone C
Clinica Neurologica, Università di Roma Tor Vergata, Italy.
J Clin Exp Neuropsychol. 1995 Oct;17(5):691-705. doi: 10.1080/01688639508405159.
This study investigated the neural basis and cognitive mechanisms of disorders affecting the visual processing of human faces. Two patients affected by prosopagnosia (PA), 45 unilateral brain-damaged patients not previously selected for gnosic disturbance, and 52 normal subjects were administered three tasks involving visual matching of unfamiliar faces, identification of famous faces, and age attribution to unknown faces. Results confirmed that the right hemisphere (and particularly the posterior region) is critical for all of the main aspects of facial processing. Neuroradiological and PET examination in both PA patients revealed a lesion in the territory of the right posterior cerebral artery (infero-mesial areas of temporal and occipital lobes). Moreover, group comparisons showed that patients affected by a right posterior lesion obtained the worst scores on all tasks of our battery. Both group comparisons and single-case analyses pointed out that a deficient recognition of familiar faces is generally independent of perceptual disorders and, as such, should be considered mnestic in nature. Disorders in the age attribution, on the contrary, appear to be strictly associated with deficits in the perceptual analysis of unfamiliar faces.
本研究调查了影响人类面部视觉处理的疾病的神经基础和认知机制。对两名面孔失认症（PA）患者、45名先前未因认知障碍而入选的单侧脑损伤患者以及52名正常受试者进行了三项任务测试，这些任务包括不熟悉面孔的视觉匹配、名人面孔识别以及对未知面孔的年龄判断。结果证实，右半球（尤其是后部区域）对面部处理的所有主要方面都至关重要。对两名PA患者进行的神经放射学和PET检查显示，右侧大脑后动脉供血区域（颞叶和枕叶的下内侧区域）存在病变。此外，组间比较表明，右侧后部病变患者在我们所有测试任务中的得分最差。组间比较和单病例分析均指出，对面孔的识别缺陷通常与感知障碍无关，因此，应被视为记忆方面的问题。相反，年龄判断障碍似乎与对不熟悉面孔的感知分析缺陷密切相关。
