title: Developmental prosopagnosia: a study of three patients.
abstract: We studied perception in three patients with prosopagnosia of childhood onset. All had trouble with other 'within-category' judgments. All were deficient on face matching tests and severely impaired on tests of perception of the spatial relations of facial features and abstract designs, indicating a deficit in the encoding of coordinate relationships, similar to adult-onset prosopagnosia with lesions of the fusiform face area. Two had difficulty perceiving feature colour, which correlated with reduced luminance sensitivity. In contrast to adult-onset patients, saturation discrimination was spared in two and spatial resolution impaired in two. Curvature discrimination was relatively spared. Contrast sensitivity showed variable reductions at different spatial frequencies. We conclude that developmental prosopagnosia is similar to the adult-onset form in encoding deficits for the spatial arrangement of facial elements. Deficits in luminance perception and spatial resolution are more associated with defective encoding for basic object-level recognition, as shown on tests of object and spatial perception.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. jbarton@caregroup.harvard.edu
authors.forename: Jason J S
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Barton
authors.forename: Mariya V
authors.initials: MV
authors.lastname: Cherkasova
authors.forename: Daniel Z
authors.initials: DZ
authors.lastname: Press
authors.forename: James M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Intriligator
authors.forename: Margaret
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: O'Connor
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001930:Brain Injuries / Q000150:complications / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D020238:Prosopagnosia / Q000150:complications / Q000175:diagnosis*; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology