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Disorders of face perception and recognition.

Jason J Barton1

  • 1Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA. jbarton@caregroup.harvard.edu

Neurologic Clinics
|August 15, 2003
PubMed
Summary

Face recognition involves complex brain processes, with the medial occipitotemporal cortex crucial for identifying faces. Damage here causes prosopagnosia, a spectrum of face recognition impairments.

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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Visual Perception

Background:

  • Face recognition is a complex visual task.
  • Area IT in monkeys and the human medial occipitotemporal cortex (including the fusiform face area - FFA) are implicated in face identification.
  • Damage to these areas causes prosopagnosia, a deficit in recognizing facial identity.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To explore the perceptual basis of prosopagnosia and related face processing disorders.
  • To understand the spectrum of impairments in prosopagnosia.
  • To investigate the role of face processing deficits in conditions like Capgras syndrome and Asperger syndrome.

Main Methods:

  • Review of functional imaging research in humans.
  • Analysis of data from patients with neurological damage affecting face recognition.
  • Examination of cognitive models of face processing stages.

Main Results:

  • Prosopagnosia is a family of dysfunctions, not a single disorder, affecting various perceptual and memory stages.
  • Face processing deficits can include false recognition of unfamiliar faces and impaired social information extraction.
  • Covert recognition phenomena are areas of ongoing research.

Conclusions:

  • Understanding prosopagnosia and other face processing deficits requires considering cognitive models.
  • Neurologic patient data and functional imaging continually refine our understanding of face processing.
  • Deficits in face perception have broader implications for social cognition and neurological disorders.

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