Prosopagnosia does not abolish other-race effects

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Social Psychology

Background:

• Healthy individuals show a Same-Race Recognition Advantage (SRRA) and Other-Race Categorization Advantage (ORCA).
• fMRI studies suggest bilateral activations in the Fusiform Face Area (FFA) and Occipital Face Area (OFA) correlate with these effects.
• The causal role of FFA and OFA in other-race effects remains unclear due to fMRI limitations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the necessity of intact FFA and OFA for SRRA and ORCA.
• To determine if damage to face-sensitive regions abolishes other-race effects.

Main Methods:

• A patient (PS) with acquired prosopagnosia and lesions in the left FFA and right OFA was tested.
• PS and control groups performed face recognition and race categorization tasks with Western Caucasian and East Asian faces.
• Stimuli were normalized for low-level properties and tested with/without external features and in naturalistic settings.

Main Results:

• PS was slower and less accurate in face processing than controls, as expected for prosopagnosia.
• Despite her deficits, PS demonstrated SRRA and ORCA comparable in magnitude to control groups across all tasks.
• These results indicate that prosopagnosia does not eliminate other-race effects.

Conclusions:

• An intact face processing system, including the left FFA and right OFA, is not critical for eliciting the SRRA and ORCA.
• Race is a significant visual and social signal processed by a widespread neural network.
• The face-sensitive network is robustly tuned for same-race face processing.