Not all patients labeled as “prosopagnosia” have a real prosopagnosia

Abstract

Since face recognition is the most powerful source of information for identifying familiar people, patients showing a multimodal defect in people recognition have been sometimes considered as affected by “prosopagnosia”—namely, by a form of visual agnosia, specifically affecting face recognition. In this note we report two anatomoclinical observations and a neuroanatomical study in which an inappropriate use of the term “prosopagnosia” was made, because the person recognition defect was not confined to the visual (face) modality, but also concerned voice and/or name of the target person. The dangers of this inappropriate use of the term prosopagnosia are briefly discussed.

Keywords:

• Prosopagnosia
• Associative prosopagnosia
• Multimodal people recognition disorders
• Familiar voice recognition
• Familiar name recognition