title: Perceptual and memorial contributions to developmental prosopagnosia.
abstract: Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is commonly associated with the failure to properly perceive individuating facial properties, notably those conveying configural or holistic content. While this may indicate that the primary impairment is perceptual, it is conceivable that some cases of DP are instead caused by a memory impairment, with any perceptual complaint merely allied rather than causal. To investigate this possibility, we administered a battery of face perception tasks to 11 individuals who reported that their face recognition difficulties disrupt daily activity and who also performed poorly on two formal tests of face recognition. Group statistics identified, relative to age- and gender-matched controls, difficulties in apprehending global-local relations and the holistic properties of faces, and in matching across viewpoints, but these were mild in nature and were not consistently evident at the level of individual participants. Six of the 11 individuals failed to show any evidence of perceptual impairment. In the remaining five individuals, no single perceptual deficit, or combination of deficits, was necessary or sufficient for poor recognition performance. These data suggest that some cases of DP are better explained by a memorial rather than perceptual deficit, and highlight the relevance of the apperceptive/associative distinction more commonly applied to the allied syndrome of acquired prosopagnosia.
authors.affiliation: a School of Psychology, Keynes College , University of Kent , Canterbury , Kent , UK.
authors.forename: Philip I N
authors.initials: PI
authors.lastname: Ulrich
authors.affiliation: a School of Psychology, Keynes College , University of Kent , Canterbury , Kent , UK.
authors.forename: David T
authors.initials: DT
authors.lastname: Wilkinson
authors.affiliation: a School of Psychology, Keynes College , University of Kent , Canterbury , Kent , UK.
authors.forename: Heather J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Ferguson
authors.affiliation: a School of Psychology, Keynes College , University of Kent , Canterbury , Kent , UK.
authors.forename: Laura J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.affiliation: a School of Psychology, Keynes College , University of Kent , Canterbury , Kent , UK.
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bindemann
authors.affiliation: a School of Psychology, Keynes College , University of Kent , Canterbury , Kent , UK.
authors.forename: Robert A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Johnston
authors.affiliation: b Department of Family Medicine and Public Health , University of California San Diego , San Diego , CA , USA.
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Schmalzl
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001244:Association; D005145:Face; D005149:Facial Expression; D005197:Famous Persons; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D020238:Prosopagnosia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological
keywords: Face blindness; Individual differences; Memory; Perception