Face matching impairment in developmental prosopagnosia

ABSTRACT

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is commonly referred to as ‘face blindness’, a term that implies a perceptual basis to the condition. However, DP presents as a deficit in face recognition and is diagnosed using memory-based tasks. Here, we test face identification ability in six people with DP, who are severely impaired on face memory tasks, using tasks that do not rely on memory. First, we compared DP to control participants on a standardized test of unfamiliar face matching using facial images taken on the same day and under standardized studio conditions (Glasgow Face Matching Test; GFMT). Scores for DP participants did not differ from normative accuracy scores on the GFMT. Second, we tested face matching performance on a test created using images that were sourced from the Internet and so varied substantially due to changes in viewing conditions and in a person’s appearance (Local Heroes Test; LHT). DP participants showed significantly poorer matching accuracy on the LHT than control participants, for both unfamiliar and familiar face matching. Interestingly, this deficit is specific to ‘match’ trials, suggesting that people with DP may have particular difficulty in matching images of the same person that contain natural day-to-day variations in appearance. We discuss these results in the broader context of individual differences in face matching ability.

KEYWORDS:

• Face perception
• Face recognition
• Congenital prosopagnosia
• Image variability
• Unfamiliar face matching

Acknowledgement

We thank Graham Nisbett (B), Filippo Caranti (B), Troy Constable (B), Ian Short (C), and the Edinburgh International Film Festival (C) for making the photographs in Figure 1 available for publication under Creative Commons licenses (CC BY 2.0).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Davide Rivolta http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9969-9135

Romina Palermo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8678-4592

Notes

1 Because this pattern is suggestive of a difference in response bias between DP and control participants, we conducted additional analysis of signal detection measures. This analysis shows both reduced sensitivity (d′) and more conservative criterion scores in the DP group, who show a tendency to respond ‘different’. Details of this analysis are available in the Supplemental Material.

2 This was surprising because DP participants were impaired in forming memory representations of faces, and also because they appear to have less familiarity with celebrity names and so may have had less exposure to the people in general (see Supplementary Material).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project grants to Richard Kemp and David White [grant number LP110100448], [grant number LP130100702]; an award to Mike Burton from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK [grant number ES/J022950/1]; an ARC Discovery Project grant to Romina Palermo [grant number DP110100850]; and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders [grant number CE110001021].