Specificity of impaired facial identity recognition in children with suspected developmental prosopagnosia

Abstract

Adults experiencing face recognition difficulties in the absence of known brain injury are described as cases of developmental prosopagnosia (DP), under the assumption that specific face recognition impairments have always been present. However, only five childhood cases of DP have been reported, and the majority had additional socio-communicative impairments consistent with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We tested face recognition skills of six 4- to 8-year-old children, who were suspected of having DP, and tested for ASD using established diagnostic tools. Two children met criteria for ASD. One child did not exhibit consistent face recognition impairments. The remaining three children were severely impaired on multiple tasks of unfamiliar face recognition despite normal cognitive functioning and no evidence of ASD. Two of these children were also impaired at object recognition suggesting more general visual recognition problems. The final child showed normal object recognition demonstrating apparently specific problems with facial identity recognition.

Keywords:

• Developmental prosopagnosia
• Autism
• Face processing
• Social development
• Visual cognition

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship and by Australian Research Council Discovery Project and Australia Research Fellowship (DP0984666). The authors are extremely grateful to the participants and their families for their willingness to take part in this research, as well as the staff and pupils at Southside Montessori School for their ongoing participation in our studies. Thanks also to Liz Pellicano for providing the Cambridge Face Memory Test for Children (CFMT-C) and some of the control data for this task and to Davide Rivolta for collecting control data for the adults' tasks.

Notes

¹ The cause of Poland's syndrome is uncertain, and the disorder is currently considered a “nonspecific developmental field defect” occurring at about the sixth week of foetal development. Current estimates of its incidence are between 1 in 7,000 and 1 in 100,000 births (Fokin & Robicsek, 2002).

² We do not report results for the third phase of the CFMT-C, in which noise is added to the target and distractor images as typical children in the relevant age range performed at chance on this phase.