Evaluating object recognition ability in developmental prosopagnosia using the Cambridge Car Memory Test

ABSTRACT

Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DP) sometimes experience object identification difficulties in addition to problems recognizing faces. To better understand the distribution of non-face object recognition ability in this population, we administered the Cambridge Car Memory Test (CCMT) – a leading, standardized measure of object recognition ability – to a large sample of DPs (N = 46). When considered as a single group, the DPs scored lower than matched controls. This finding provides further evidence that developmental object agnosia (DOA) may be more common in DP than in the general population. Relative to the DPs’ face recognition deficits, however, car matching deficits were small and inconsistent. In fact, we observed a striking range of CCMT performance in our DP sample. While some DPs performed extremely poorly, many more achieved scores within one standard deviation of the typical mean, and several DP participants achieved excellent CCMT scores comparable with the best controls.

KEYWORDS:

• Developmental prosopagnosia
• face recognition
• object recognition
• independent disorders hypothesis
• Cambridge Car Memory Test

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Katie L. H. Gray http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6071-4588

Richard Cook http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2370-3086

Notes

1 The versions of the CFMT and CCMT employed here do not record response latencies.

2 Dennett and colleagues speculate that this may reflect the fact that male observers sometimes have greater knowledge of existing car manufacturers and models.