Face gender recognition in developmental prosopagnosia: Evidence for holistic processing and use of configural information

Abstract

Face identification deficits in developmental prosopagnosics (DPs) have been thought to be due to general difficulties with processing configural face information and integrating configural and parts information into a coherent whole (holistic processing). Gender recognition provides a further opportunity to more fully examine this issue as this ability may be intact in DPs and it has been shown to depend on processing configural information and holistic processing in neurotypical individuals. In the present study we first determined that, indeed, gender discrimination performance was similar in DPs and controls. Second, we found that inversion and scrambling (which we propose measures holistic processing and sensitivity to configural information, respectively) produced comparable deficits in DPs and controls, suggesting that both groups use holistic processing and configural information to recognize gender. This indicates that holistic processing and using configural face information are not general impairments in DP and may be more specific to face identity.

Keywords:

• Developmental prosopagnosia
• Face inversion
• Gender recognition
• Holistic processing

Acknowledgments

We thank Lindsay Morra for help in creating stimuli and Mintao Zhao for help with putting together the tasks and stimuli. This work was supported by a VA CDA II grant to JD and an NIH award R01 EY13602 to KN.

Notes

¹We consider neurotypical individuals as those who have neurological development and face processing abilities that are consistent with what most researchers would regard as normal. According to this definition, nonneurotypical individuals would include developmental prosopagnosics and those suffering from autism spectrum disorders.