de Gelder B, Bachoud-Lévi A C, Degos J D
Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology and Psychophysiology, Tilburg University, LE, The Netherlands.
Vision Res. 1998 Sep;38(18):2855-61. doi: 10.1016/s0042-6989(97)00458-6.
Selective impairment in recognition of faces (prosopagnosia) resulting from certain localized cortical lesions has been advanced as an argument for a face specific brain module. The argument is claimed to be strengthened by the discovery of an inversion superiority effect in the recognition of faces by a prosopagnosic patient (Farah et al., Vis Res 1995b;35:2089-2093). The present paper reports an inversion superiority effect in the recognition of faces and shoes in a visual agnosic patient. The finding raises the possibility that several classes of orientationally polarized objects, of which shoes and faces are examples, will exhibit inversion superiority.
