“Looking at nothing”: An implicit ocular motor index of face recognition in developmental prosopagnosia

ABSTRACT

Subjects often look towards to previous location of a stimulus related to a task even when that stimulus is no longer visible. In this study we asked whether this effect would be preserved or reduced in subjects with developmental prosopagnosia. Participants learned faces presented in video-clips and then saw a brief montage of four faces, which was replaced by a screen with empty boxes, at which time they indicated whether the learned face had been present in the montage. Control subjects were more likely to look at the blank location where the learned face had appeared, on both hit and miss trials, though the effect was larger on hit trials. Prosopagnosic subjects showed a reduced effect, though still better on hit than on miss trials. We conclude that explicit accuracy and our implicit looking at nothing effect are parallel effects reflecting the strength of the neural activity underlying face recognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Face perception
• fixation
• covert
• object agnosia
• eye movement

Acknowledgements:

JB was supported by Canada Research Chair 950–232752 and the Marianne Koerner Chair in Brain Diseases. This work was supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Discovery Grant RGPIN 319129 and Canadian Institutes of Health Research, operating grant MOP-102567.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The control data were reported as experiment 3 in Malaspina et al. (2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Canada Research Chairs: [Grant Number 950-232752]; Discovery Grants Program : [Grant Number 319129].