Elsevier

Cortex

Volume 74, January 2016, Pages 53-66
Cortex

Research report
Perceptual face processing in developmental prosopagnosia is not sensitive to the canonical location of face parts

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.10.018Get rights and content

Abstract

Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DP) are strongly impaired in recognizing faces, but it is controversial whether this deficit is linked to atypical visual-perceptual face processing mechanisms. Previous behavioural studies have suggested that face perception in DP might be less sensitive to the canonical spatial configuration of face parts in upright faces. To test this prediction, we recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to intact upright faces and to faces with spatially scrambled parts (eyes, nose, and mouth) in a group of ten participants with DP and a group of ten age-matched control participants with normal face recognition abilities. The face-sensitive N170 component and the vertex positive potential (VPP) were both enhanced and delayed for scrambled as compared to intact faces in the control group. In contrast, N170 and VPP amplitude enhancements to scrambled faces were absent in the DP group. For control participants, the N170 to scrambled faces was also sensitive to feature locations, with larger and delayed N170 components contralateral to the side where all features appeared in a non-canonical position. No such differences were present in the DP group. These findings suggest that spatial templates of the prototypical feature locations within an upright face are selectively impaired in DP.

Section snippets

Participants

Ten participants with DP (five females, aged 21–58 years; mean age: 40 years) and ten age-matched control participants (five females, aged 25–54 years; mean age: 39 years) were tested. All DP participants reported severe difficulties with face recognition since childhood. They were recruited after contacting our research website (http://www.faceblind.org). To assess and verify their face recognition problems, behavioural tests were conducted in two sessions on separate days, and prior to the

Behaviour

Mean response times (RTs) on infrequent target trials where an immediate stimulus repetition was correctly detected were 744 msec for control participants and 757 msec for participants with DP, and did not differ between the two groups (t < 1). Due to the inclusion of mirror-reversed versions of the same upright face images, participants adopted a conservative response criterion for the one-back detection task. This was reflected by relatively low target detection percentages of 66% in the

Discussion

Recent neuroimaging and electrophysiological investigations into the nature of the face recognition problems suffered by individuals with DP have suggested that early visual-perceptual stages of face processing operate largely normally in DP. There appear to be little difference between DPs and control participants in the pattern of face-selective neural activity within the core posterior face processing network (e.g., Avidan et al., 2014), or in the face-sensitivity of the N170 component (

Conflict of interest

None declared.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by a grant (ES/K002457/1) from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), UK.

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