title: The man who mistook his neuropsychologist for a popstar: when configural processing fails in acquired prosopagnosia.
abstract: We report the case of an individual with acquired prosopagnosia who experiences extreme difficulties in recognizing familiar faces in everyday life despite excellent object recognition skills. Formal testing indicates that he is also severely impaired at remembering pre-experimentally unfamiliar faces and that he takes an extremely long time to identify famous faces and to match unfamiliar faces. Nevertheless, he performs as accurately and quickly as controls at identifying inverted familiar and unfamiliar faces and can recognize famous faces from their external features. He also performs as accurately as controls at recognizing famous faces when fracturing conceals the configural information in the face. He shows evidence of impaired global processing but normal local processing of Navon figures. This case appears to reflect the clearest example yet of an acquired prosopagnosic patient whose familiar face recognition deficit is caused by a severe configural processing deficit in the absence of any problems in featural processing. These preserved featural skills together with apparently intact visual imagery for faces allow him to identify a surprisingly large number of famous faces when unlimited time is available. The theoretical implications of this pattern of performance for understanding the nature of acquired prosopagnosia are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London London, UK.
authors.forename: Ashok
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Jansari
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of East London London, UK.
authors.forename: Scott
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of East London London, UK.
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Pearce
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of East London London, UK.
authors.forename: Stephanie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Cobb
authors.affiliation: Department of Life Sciences, Centre for Cognition and Neuroimaging, Brunel University London, UK.
authors.forename: Noam
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Sagiv
authors.affiliation: Department of Life Sciences, Centre for Cognition and Neuroimaging, Brunel University London, UK.
authors.forename: Adrian L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Williams
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, College of Health and Human Sciences, Swansea University Swansea, UK.
authors.forename: Jeremy J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Tree
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Essex Colchester, UK.
authors.forename: J Richard
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Hanley
keywords: FRUs; Navon; configural processing; face-recognition; featural processing; holistic processing; mental-imagery; prosopagnosia