title: Impairment of holistic face perception following right occipito-temporal damage in prosopagnosia: converging evidence from gaze-contingency.
abstract: Gaze-contingency is a method traditionally used to investigate the perceptual span in reading by selectively revealing/masking a portion of the visual field in real time. Introducing this approach in face perception research showed that the performance pattern of a brain-damaged patient with acquired prosopagnosia (PS) in a face matching task was reversed, as compared to normal observers: the patient showed almost no further decrease of performance when only one facial part (eye, mouth, nose, etc.) was available at a time (foveal window condition, forcing part-based analysis), but a very large impairment when the fixated part was selectively masked (mask condition, promoting holistic perception) (Van Belle, De Graef, Verfaillie, Busigny, & Rossion, 2010a; Van Belle, De Graef, Verfaillie, Rossion, & Lefèvre, 2010b). Here we tested the same manipulation in a recently reported case of pure prosopagnosia (GG) with unilateral right hemisphere damage (Busigny, Joubert, Felician, Ceccaldi, & Rossion, 2010). Contrary to normal observers, GG was also significantly more impaired with a mask than with a window, demonstrating impairment with holistic face perception. Together with our previous study, these observations support a generalized account of acquired prosopagnosia as a critical impairment of holistic (individual) face perception, implying that this function is a key element of normal human face recognition. Furthermore, the similar behavioral pattern of the two patients despite different lesion localizations supports a distributed network view of the neural face processing structures, suggesting that the key function of human face processing, namely holistic perception of individual faces, requires the activity of several brain areas of the right hemisphere and their mutual connectivity.
authors.affiliation: Université catholique de Louvain, Institute of Research in Psychology (IPSY), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. goedele.vanbelle@uclouvain.be
authors.forename: Goedele
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Van Belle
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Busigny
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Lefèvre
authors.forename: Sven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Joubert
authors.forename: Olivier
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Felician
authors.forename: Francesco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Gentile
authors.forename: Bruno
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Rossion
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D001925:Brain Damage, Chronic / Q000150:complications* / Q000473:pathology / Q000523:psychology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology; D005145:Face; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009778:Occipital Lobe / Q000473:pathology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D020238:Prosopagnosia / Q000209:etiology* / Q000523:psychology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D020521:Stroke / Q000150:complications / Q000473:pathology; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000473:pathology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*