'Who's that girl?' Prosopagnosia, person-based semantic disorder, and the reacquisition of face identification ability

Abstract

Data are reported on three rehabilitation studies conducted on a patient, NE, who shows a tendency to misidentify familiar faces due to a person-based semantic disorder complicated by prosopagnosia. Therapy aimed to improve NE's ability to learn to recognise new people (Study 1), and her ability to recognise previously familiar people (Studies 2 and 3). In all studies, we contrasted therapy that targeted all of NE's difficulties simultaneously with therapy that focused on only one area. We show positive effects of therapy that targeted both the prosopagnosic and the semantic impairments. We discuss the implications for remediating prosopagnosia, semantic memory disturbance, and cognitive disorders that are due to multiple loci of impairment.