Abstract
Prosopagnosia is a disorder leading to difficulties in recognizing faces. However, recent evidence suggests that individuals with congenital prosopagnosia can achieve considerable accuracy when they have to recognize their own faces (self-face advantage). Yet, whether this advantage is face-specific or not is still unclear. Here, we aimed to investigate whether individuals with congenial prosopagnosia show a self-advantage also in recognizing other self body-parts and, if so, whether the advantage for the body parts differs from the one characterizing the self-face. Eight individuals with congenital prosopagnosia and 22 controls underwent a delayed matching task in which they were required to recognize faces, hands and feet belonging to the self or to others. Controls showed a similar self-advantage for all the stimuli tested; by contrast, individuals with congenital prosopagnosia showed a larger self-advantage with faces compared to hands and feet, mainly driven by their deficit with others’ faces. In both groups the self-advantages for the different body parts were strongly and significantly correlated. Our data suggest that the self-face advantage showed by individuals with congenital prosopagnosia is not face-specific and that the same mechanism could be responsible for both the self-face and self body-part advantages.
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Notes
Since previous papers have suggested that females tend to outperform males in different test of face recognition (Herlitz and Lovén 2013; Herlitz and Yonker 2002; Rennels and Cummings 2013) we first verified whether there was any difference in performance between female and male participants in both the control and CP groups. For each one of our conditions, independent samples t-test between female and male participants were run on the accuracy, RTs and IES data of the control participants, while the performance of the male individual with CP was compared to the one of the female individuals with CP by using single-subject statistics (Crawford and Garthwaite 2002). No significant differences were found between female and male controls in any of the conditions (all ps > 0.05). Similarly, in the CP group, the performance of the male individual was comparable to the one of the females in all conditions (all ps > 0.05). Given these results, we decided to exclude the participant’s genders from the factor list in all subsequent analyses.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Cecilia Cannistraci for her precious help in data recruitment and all the participants who took part in the study. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments on the manuscript. The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.
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Malaspina, M., Albonico, A. & Daini, R. Self-face and self-body advantages in congenital prosopagnosia: evidence for a common mechanism. Exp Brain Res 237, 673–686 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-018-5452-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-018-5452-7