Impaired face and body perception in developmental prosopagnosia

Prosopagnosia is a deficit in face recognition in the presence of relatively normal object recognition. Together with older lesion studies, recent brain-imaging results provide evidence for the closely related representations of faces and objects and, more recently, for brain areas sensitive to faces and bodies. This evidence raises the issue of whether developmental prosopagnosics may also have an impairment in encoding bodies. We investigated the first stages of face, body, and object perception in four developmental prosopagnosics by comparing event-related potentials to canonically and upside-down presented stimuli. Normal configural encoding was absent in three of four developmental prosopagnosics for faces at the P1 and for both faces and bodies at the N170 component. Our results demonstrate that prosopagnosics do not have this normal processing routine readily available for faces or bodies. A profound face recognition deficit characteristic of developmental prosopagnosia may not necessarily originate in a category-specific face recognition deficit in the initial stages of development. It may also have its roots in anomalous processing of the configuration, a visual routine that is important for other stimuli besides faces. Faces and bodies trigger configuration-based visual strategies that are crucial in initial stages of stimulus encoding but also serve to bootstrap the acquisition of more feature-based visual skills that progressively build up in the course of development.