the early time course of compensatory face processing in congenital prosopagnosia早期的补偿处理先天性面容失认症.pdf

The Early Time Course of Compensatory Face Processing in Congenital Prosopagnosia 1 ¨ 1,2 1 3 Rainer Stollhoff *, Jurgen Jost , Tobias Elze , Ingo Kennerknecht 1 Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, 2 Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States of America, 3 Institute of Human ¨ ¨ ¨ Genetics, Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat, Munster, Germany Abstract Background: Prosopagnosia is a selective deficit in facial identification which can be either acquired, (e.g., after brain damage), or present from birth (congenital). The face recognition deficit in prosopagnosia is characterized by worse accuracy, longer reaction times, more dispersed gaze behavior and a strong reliance on featural processing. Methods/Principal Findings: We introduce a conceptual model of an apperceptive/associative type of congenital prosopagnosia where a deficit in holistic processing is compensated by a serial inspection of isolated, informative features. Based on the model proposed we investigated performance differences in different face and shoe identification tasks between a group of 16 participants with congenital prosopagnosia and a group of 36 age-matched controls. Given enough training and unlimited stimulus presentation prosopagnosics achieved normal face identification accuracy evincing longer reaction times. The latter increase was paralleled by an equally-sized increase in stimulus presentation times needed achieve an accuracy of 80%. When the inspection time of stimuli was limited (50ms to 750ms), prosopagnosics only showed worse accuracy but no difference in reaction time. Tested for the