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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
A Detailed Investigation Of Facial Expression Processing In Congenital Prosopagnosia As Compared To Acquired Prosopagnosia, Kate Humphreys, Galia Avidan, Marlene Behrmann
A Detailed Investigation Of Facial Expression Processing In Congenital Prosopagnosia As Compared To Acquired Prosopagnosia, Kate Humphreys, Galia Avidan, Marlene Behrmann
Marlene Behrmann
Whether the ability to recognize facial expression can be preserved in the absence of the recognition of facial identity remains controversial. The current study reports the results of a detailed investigation of facial expression recognition in three congenital prosopagnosic (CP) participants, in comparison with two patients with acquired prosopagnosia (AP) and a large group of 30 neurologically normal participants, including individually age- and gender-matched controls. Participants completed a fine-grained expression recognition paradigm requiring a six-alternative forced-choice response to continua of morphs of six different basic facial expressions (e.g. happiness and surprise). Accuracy, sensitivity and reaction times were measured. The performance …
Complementary Neural Representations For Faces And Words: A Computational Exploration, David Plaut, Marlene Behrmann
Complementary Neural Representations For Faces And Words: A Computational Exploration, David Plaut, Marlene Behrmann
Marlene Behrmann
A key issue that continues to generate controversy concerns the nature of the psychological, computational, and neural mechanisms that support the visual recognition of objects such as faces and words. While some researchers claim that visual recognition is accomplished by category-specific modules dedicated to processing distinct object classes, other researchers have argued for a more distributed system with only partially specialized cortical regions. Considerable evidence from both functional neuroimaging and neuropsychology would seem to favour the modular view, and yet close examination of those data reveals rather graded patterns of specialization that support a more distributed account. This paper explores …
Bilateral Hemispheric Processing Of Words And Faces: Evidence From Word Impairments In Prosopagnosia And Face Impairments In Pure Alexia, Marlene Behrmann, David Plaut
Bilateral Hemispheric Processing Of Words And Faces: Evidence From Word Impairments In Prosopagnosia And Face Impairments In Pure Alexia, Marlene Behrmann, David Plaut
Marlene Behrmann
Considerable research has supported the view that faces and words are subserved by independent neural mechanisms located in the ventral visual cortex in opposite hemispheres. On this view, right hemisphere ventral lesions that impair face recognition (prosopagnosia) should leave word recognition unaffected, and left hemisphere ventral lesions that impair word recognition (pure alexia) should leave face recognition unaffected. The current study shows that neither of these predictions was upheld. A series of experiments characterizing speed and accuracy of word and face recognition were conducted in 7 patients (4 pure alexic, 3 prosopagnosic) and matched controls. Prosopagnosic patients revealed mild but …
Probing The Face-Space Of Individuals With Prosopagnosia, Mayu Nishimura, Jaime Doyle, Kate Humphreys, Marlene Behrmann
Probing The Face-Space Of Individuals With Prosopagnosia, Mayu Nishimura, Jaime Doyle, Kate Humphreys, Marlene Behrmann
Marlene Behrmann
A useful framework for understanding the mental representation of facial identity is face-space (Valentine, 1991), a multi-dimensional cognitive map in which individual faces are coded relative to the average of previously encountered faces, and in which the distance among faces represents their perceived similarity. We examined whether individuals with prosopagnosia, a disorder characterized by an inability to recognize familiar faces despite normal visual acuity and intellectual abilities, evince behavior consistent with this underlying representational schema. To do so, we compared the performance of 6 individuals with congenital prosopagnosia (CP), with a group of age- and gender-matched control participants …