Normal facial age and gender perception in developmental prosopagnosia

Abstract

Developmental prosopagnosia is characterized by a severe deficit in face-identity recognition. Most developmental prosopagnosics do not report deficits of facial age or gender perception. We developed tasks for evaluating facial age and gender processing and used them in the largest group of developmental prosopagnosics (N = 18) tested on facial age and gender perception. Care was taken to ensure that the tests were sufficiently sensitive to subtle deficits and required holistic processing as assessed by strong inversion effects in control subjects. Despite severe facial identity deficits, developmental prosopagnosics largely performed these discriminations comparably to controls. The common descriptor “faceblind” implied by the term prosopagnosia is inaccurate as certain kinds of nonidentity facial information, which we call physiognomic features, are processed well by both prosopagnosics and age-matched controls alike. Normal facial age and gender perception in developmental prosopagnosics is consistent with parallel processing models in the cognitive architecture of face processing.

Keywords:

• Face recognition
• Facial gender perception
• Facial age perception
• Developmental prosopagnosia
• Face perception

Acknowledgments

Supported by the US National Eye Institute (NEI) grant [Grant R01 EY01362 to K.N.]. Research conducted at: Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. All participants, including normal control participants, gave informed consent prior to their participation as directed by the Harvard University Committee on the Use of Human Subjects in Research.