Perceptual and cognitive processes in developmental prosopagnosia.

摘要

Facial cognition is extremely important to human survival; therefore how facial information is processed is of vital interest. Situations where face information processing is compromised can be used to explore these processes---the nature of deficits, comorbidities and crucially, what is spared. From the studies presented in the thesis, a picture emerges of what developmental prosopagnosia is and also what it is not. Visual memory deficits are demonstrated in developmental prosopagnosics. However, verbal episodic memory is spared and comparable to the control population. The developmental prosopagnosics perform normally when challenged with a memory task in which the nature of information to be encoded is verbal in nature. Even within the facial domain, the deficit is limited to identity and does not extend to other kinds of facial information, such as age and gender. Therefore, developmental prosopagnosics appear to exhibit no deficiencies in processing physiognomic information, executing demanding discrimination tasks with ease. Finally, prosopagnosics do not show generalized disability in holistic processing of faces and share the typical hallmarks of holistic processing with the control population.