Face context interferes with local part processing in a prosopagnosic patient

We investigated the role of local and global information on perceptual encoding of faces in patient HJA, who shows prosopagnosia and visual agnosia following occipito-temporal damage. HJA and an age-matched control were tested in a simultaneous matching task which focused on detection of local changes in faces: the inversion of central parts (eyes and mouth) relative to their context (as in the Thatcher illusion). Same-different judgements were made to normal, "that cherised" and mixed type face pairs. Whole faces (Experiment 1), or face parts (Experiment 2), were presented in upright and inverted orientations. Compared to the control, HJA was severely impaired at matching whole faces, but he improved dramatically when face parts were presented in isolation. This suggests an inhibitory influence of face context on HJAs processing of local parts and a relatively intact ability to process part-based information from a face (when context cannot interfere). Face inversion did not affect HJAs performance. A control experiment (Experiment 3) with non-face stimuli (houses) suggested that the inhibitory influence of context on HJAs performance was restricted to faces. These results indicate that contextual information in a face can have an adverse influence on the processing of local part-based information in prosopagnosia.

[1]  Gillian Rhodes,et al.  What's lost in inverted faces? , 1993, Cognition.

[2]  J. Bartlett,et al.  Inversion and Configuration of Faces , 1993, Cognitive Psychology.

[3]  I Rock,et al.  On Thompson's Inverted-Face Phenomenon (Research Note) , 1988, Perception.

[4]  G. Humphreys,et al.  The Fractionation of Visual Agnosia , 1987 .

[5]  B. Gelder,et al.  Impaired face recognition does not preclude intact whole face perception , 2002 .

[6]  J Sergent,et al.  Varieties of functional deficits in prosopagnosia. , 1992, Cerebral cortex.

[7]  E K Warrington,et al.  Prosopagnosia: A Reclassification , 1991, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[8]  V. Bruce,et al.  The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A: Human Experimental Psychology When Inverted Faces Are Recognized: the Role of Configural Information in Face Recognition , 2022 .

[9]  G. Rhodes,et al.  Revisiting the Perception of Upside-Down Faces , 2000, Psychological science.

[10]  D. Homa,et al.  Perceptibility of schematic face stimuli: Evidence for a perceptual Gestalt , 1976, Memory & cognition.

[11]  M. Farah,et al.  Parts and Wholes in Face Recognition , 1993, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[12]  Glyn W Humphreys,et al.  AGNOSIA WITHOUT PROSOPAGNOSIA OR ALEXIA: EVIDENCE FOR STORED VISUAL MEMORIES SPECIFIC TO OBJECTS. , 1998, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[13]  Glyn W. Humphreys,et al.  The computation of occluded contours in visual agnosia: Evidence for early computation prior to shape binding and figure-ground coding , 2000, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[14]  G. Winocur,et al.  What Is Special about Face Recognition? Nineteen Experiments on a Person with Visual Object Agnosia and Dyslexia but Normal Face Recognition , 1997, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[15]  G. Humphreys,et al.  A case of integrative visual agnosia. , 1987, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[16]  G W Humphreys,et al.  Parallel pattern processing and visual agnosia. , 1992, Canadian journal of psychology.

[17]  B. Gelder,et al.  Paradoxical configuration effects for faces and objects in prosopagnosia , 2000, Neuropsychologia.

[18]  A. Young,et al.  Recognition impairments and face imagery , 1994, Neuropsychologia.

[19]  Physiological Aspects of Clinical Neuro-ophthalmology , 1998 .

[20]  E. Renzi,et al.  Prosopagnosia in two patients with CT scan evidence of damage confined to the right hemisphere , 1986, Neuropsychologia.

[21]  James W. Tanaka,et al.  What causes the face inversion effect , 1995 .

[22]  M. Farah,et al.  The inverted face inversion effect in prosopagnosia: Evidence for mandatory, face-specific perceptual mechanisms , 1995, Vision Research.

[23]  M. Farah,et al.  What is "special" about face perception? , 1998, Psychological review.

[24]  Glyn W. Humphreys,et al.  Expression is computed separately from facial identity, and it is computed separately for moving and static faces: Neuropsychological evidence , 1993, Neuropsychologia.

[25]  Joachim Bodamer,et al.  Die Prosop-Agnosie , 2004, Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten.

[26]  D. Levine,et al.  Prosopagnosia: A defect in visual configural processing , 1989, Brain and Cognition.

[27]  B. de Gelder,et al.  Beyond localisation: a dynamical dual route account of face recognition. , 2001, Acta psychologica.

[28]  G. Humphreys,et al.  The real-object advantage in agnosia: Evidence for a role of surface and depth information in object recognition , 2001, Cognitive Neuropsychology.

[29]  G. Humphreys,et al.  To See But Not To See: A Case Study Of Visual Agnosia , 1987 .

[30]  B. de Gelder,et al.  STRUCTURAL ENCODING PRECLUDES RECOGNITION OF FACE PARTS IN PROSOPAGNOSIA , 2000, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[31]  D. Navon.  Forest before trees: The precedence of global features in visual perception , 1977, Cognitive Psychology.

[32]  P. Thompson,et al.  Margaret Thatcher: A New Illusion , 1980, Perception.

[33]  G. Humphreys,et al.  Routes to Object Constancy: Implications from Neurological Impairments of Object Constancy , 1984, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[34]  G W Humphreys,et al.  Memories are made of this: the effects of time on stored visual knowledge in a case of visual agnosia. , 1999, Brain : a journal of neurology.