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A detailed investigation of facial expression processing in congenital prosopagnosia as compared to acquired prosopagnosia

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Abstract

Whether the ability to recognize facial expression can be preserved in the absence of the recognition of facial identity remains controversial. The current study reports the results of a detailed investigation of facial expression recognition in three congenital prosopagnosic (CP) participants, in comparison with two patients with acquired prosopagnosia (AP) and a large group of 30 neurologically normal participants, including individually age- and gender-matched controls. Participants completed a fine-grained expression recognition paradigm requiring a six-alternative forced-choice response to continua of morphs of six different basic facial expressions (e.g. happiness and surprise). Accuracy, sensitivity and reaction times were measured. The performance of all three CP individuals was indistinguishable from that of controls, even for the most subtle expressions. In contrast, both individuals with AP displayed pronounced difficulties with the majority of expressions. The results from the CP participants attest to the dissociability of the processing of facial identity and of facial expression. Whether this remarkably good expression recognition is achieved through normal, or compensatory, mechanisms remains to be determined. Either way, this normal level of performance does not extend to include facial identity.

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Notes

  1. We distinguish this from the more general term ‘developmental prosopagnosia’, which encompasses both the congenital cases and those caused by brain injury or any known neuropathology during development.

  2. Note that the data on the CP individuals on these tasks are also presented in Behrmann et al. (2005).

  3. Log reaction times were used here, but not for the identity tasks, to deal with the increased number of outliers for all groups, due to the length of the task (approximately five times longer than the identity task). This was thought preferable to excluding these data completely.

  4. An analysis based on z-scores, such as this, is not strictly speaking, appropriate, as in many cases (e.g. sadness responses to an expression of happiness), there was very little variation in the control group data, and, certainly they were not normally distributed. However, in this subsidiary analysis, we wished merely to give an indication of the relative numbers of ‘atypical’ responses for the CP and AP individuals.

  5. It should be noted that this accuracy for happiness was not a criterion bias, as neither participant had a tendency to answer ‘happy’ for the other stimuli, although for surprise this may have been so (particularly in the case of AP2, who answered ‘surprise’ approximately twice as often as normal).

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the help of Grace Lee Leonard in scheduling and testing participants and we are indebted to all the participants and their families, who generously gave of their time.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Baker Hall, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213-3890, USA

    Kate Humphreys, Galia Avidan & Marlene Behrmann

Authors
  1. Kate Humphreys
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  2. Galia Avidan
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  3. Marlene Behrmann
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kate Humphreys.

Additional information

This work was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health to MB (54246).

Appendix

Appendix

Analysis of performance on the 70 and 90% expressions averaged together

Mean accuracy and log reaction times for the prosopagnosics and age and gender matched controls averaged across the 90 and 70% morphs are shown in Fig. 7. It can be seen that the pattern of results is highly similar to that for the 90% morphs alone (Fig. 5).

Fig. 7
figure 7

Expression recognition accuracy and log reaction times averaged across the 70 and 90% expression blends for acquired and congenital prosopagnosics and controls

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As in the analysis for the 90% morphs, results falling outside two standard deviations from the control mean (calculated from the 30 control adults) were considered atypical. As in the main (90% only) analysis, all CP individuals were well within two standard deviations of speed and accuracy limits for recognizing all six unambiguous expressions. In contrast, both AP individuals fell outside these limits for accuracy at recognizing anger, disgust and sadness, with AP2 the more severely affected (and additionally impaired at recognizing fear). Both AP individuals were also slow to recognize all expressions with the exception of sadness, for which AP1 was just within normal limits.

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Humphreys, K., Avidan, G. & Behrmann, M. A detailed investigation of facial expression processing in congenital prosopagnosia as compared to acquired prosopagnosia. Exp Brain Res 176, 356–373 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-006-0621-5

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