Prosopagnosia is a deficit in recognising familiar faces. Patients report inability to judge age, gender or recognise certain emotional expressions (Corrow, Dalrymple & Barton, 2016). Cognitive tests of prosopagnosia include accuracy and reaction time variable, were the patients are required to name famous faces or to make response time judgements for face-name pairings.
Philip is an example of a patient with acquired prosopagnosia. He obtained his condition after a car accident which resulted in damage to his temporal lobe. Philip is in his early forties and can recognise buildings and household objects, his problem is recognising people’s faces, animals, fruit and vegetables. Philip relies heavily on context and vocal cues to compensate for his prosopagnosia (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 2005).
Among the biological explanations for prosopagnosia, is covert/overt recognition. Some prosopagnosia patients show signs of covert recognition (Bruyer, 1991), that is an indication that at some level their brains can discriminate between faces. There have been numerous explanations for covert recognition. Bauer (1984) pinned face processing to two streams of processing, which suggested that conscious overt face recognition is facilitated by …show more content…
When the brain is presented with a face, the FRUs are activated and the face is compared with a database of stored images of all the faces a person has ever seen, known as the right fusiform gyrus. If a match is found, the anterior temporal cortex recalls a store of information about the person (PINs) and name retrieval occurs (Gainotti, 2014). However, with prosopagnosia, face recognition does not occur; this is thought to be due to damage to the right fusiform gyrus (Lidaka, 2013). This theory suggests that prosopagnosia is a face specific problem, that patients are still able to identify other objects that aren’t
Philip is an example of a patient with acquired prosopagnosia. He obtained his condition after a car accident which resulted in damage to his temporal lobe. Philip is in his early forties and can recognise buildings and household objects, his problem is recognising people’s faces, animals, fruit and vegetables. Philip relies heavily on context and vocal cues to compensate for his prosopagnosia (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 2005).
Among the biological explanations for prosopagnosia, is covert/overt recognition. Some prosopagnosia patients show signs of covert recognition (Bruyer, 1991), that is an indication that at some level their brains can discriminate between faces. There have been numerous explanations for covert recognition. Bauer (1984) pinned face processing to two streams of processing, which suggested that conscious overt face recognition is facilitated by …show more content…
When the brain is presented with a face, the FRUs are activated and the face is compared with a database of stored images of all the faces a person has ever seen, known as the right fusiform gyrus. If a match is found, the anterior temporal cortex recalls a store of information about the person (PINs) and name retrieval occurs (Gainotti, 2014). However, with prosopagnosia, face recognition does not occur; this is thought to be due to damage to the right fusiform gyrus (Lidaka, 2013). This theory suggests that prosopagnosia is a face specific problem, that patients are still able to identify other objects that aren’t