Congenital prosopagnosia without object agnosia? A literature review

ABSTRACT

A longstanding controversy concerns the functional organization of high-level vision, and the extent to which the recognition of different classes of visual stimuli engages a single system or multiple independent systems. We examine this in the context of congenital prosopagnosia (CP), a neurodevelopmental disorder in which individuals, without a history of brain damage, are impaired at face recognition. This paper reviews all CP cases from 1976 to 2016, and explores the evidence for the association or dissociation of face and object recognition. Of the 238 CP cases with data permitting a satisfactory evaluation, 80.3% evinced an association between impaired face and object recognition whereas 19.7% evinced a dissociation. We evaluate the strength of the evidence and correlate the face and object recognition behaviour. We consider the implications for theories of functional organization of the visual system, and offer suggestions for further adjudication of the relationship between face and object recognition.

KEYWORDS:

• domain specificity
• face recognition
• modularity
• object recognition
• prosopagnosia

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the many authors who shared the data from their individual participants (I. Bulthoff, J. Esins, J. Liu, Y. Song, Y. Zhao, L. Garrido, and B. Duchaine, with N. Furl, S. Song, and M. Lohse). We thank Meike Ramon for clarifying aspects of the data from her research with us. We also thank David Plaut, Erez Freud, and Galia Avidan for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We thank Jason Barton for raising this important distinction.

2. The assumption of equal distribution to categories is made given that we have no a priori expectations of such a distribution. Simply having parity across the three categories then is an assumption-free approach to the χ².

3. Note that we excluded one outlier from the Esins et al. (2014) data in deriving the mean and standard deviation for RT. This participant had a mean RT of 11.66 s for the Blue Objects task when the mean of remaining controls is 2.7 s.

4. A.W. had a topographical deficit as well as she gets lost often and loses possessions. She scored poorly on the Old/New Scenes test and on the Warrington Topographical Recognition Memory test. A.W. performed normally on all sections of the within-category faces, bodies, and birds test in A′ and RT.

5. We thank Brad Duchaine for drawing our attention to this point.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number BCS0923763].