Haptic face recognition and prosopagnosia

Cases of cross-modal influence have been observed since the beginning of psychological science. Yet some abilities like face recognition are traditionally only investigated in the visual domain. People with normal visual face-recognition capacities identify inverted faces more poorly than upright faces. An abnormal pattern of performance with inverted faces by prosopagnosic individuals is characteristically interpreted as evidence for a deficit in configural processing essential for normal face recognition. We investigated whether such problems are unique to vision by examining face processing by hand in a prosopagnosic individual. We used the haptic equivalent of the visual-inversion paradigm to investigate haptic face recognition. If face processing is specific to vision, our participant should not show difficulty processing faces haptically and should perform with the same ease as normal controls. Instead, we show that a prosopagnosic individual cannot haptically recognize faces. Moreover, he shows similar abnormal inversion effects by hand and eye. These results suggest that face-processing deficits can be found across different input modalities. Our findings also extend the notion of configural processing to haptic face and object recognition.