Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
945185 Neuropsychologia 2008 11 Pages PDF
Abstract

Acquired prosopagnosia is usually associated with bilateral or right-sided lesions of the occipital or temporal lobes. In rare cases of prosopagnosia after left-sided lesions in left-handed subjects, it is attributed to a reversed hemispheric specialization for face processing.This study examines the face-processing functions of a left-handed prosopagnosic patient with a left-sided lesion affecting the region of the occipital face area and possibly the fusiform face area, to contrast his deficits with those of prosopagnosic patients with right-hemispheric lesions.Similar to those patients, he has a moderately severe reduction in familiarity judgments, is impaired in processing face configuration, and shares with some of those patients a greater failure to process eye than mouth information, indicating an altered pattern of facial saliency. He has a mild reduction in the identification of exemplars of non-face objects.Unlike those patients, he has better residual familiarity on a two-alternative forced-choice task and can processing facial configuration if given more time, indicating a reduction in efficiency rather than a severe limitation. He has more difficulty accessing semantic–biographic information from names. He has trouble with facial feature imagery but not imagery for global face shape.Thus this subject's deficits represent a combination of impaired familiarity and configuration processing (normally right-sided functions in right-handed subjects), and impaired feature processing and access to semantic–biographic information (normally left-sided functions). His prosopagnosia likely reflects partially anomalous rather than reversed lateralization of hemispheric perceptual functions.

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