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Abstract:
Face blindness, also known as prosopagnosia, is an inability
to recognize faces with otherwise normal perception. It usually
results from posterior occipito-temporal lesions. Nevertheless,
face-specific recognition deficits can occur in individuals with no
neurological history and be present early in development, likely
resulting from a congenital condition. Such a single case study of
subject YT was presented by Bentin, Deouell, & Soroker (1999).
They showed that while the posterior temporal N170 event-related
potential component (normally elicited preferentially by faces) was
present in YT, it did not discriminate between faces and objects.
It is unclear however whether this pattern is typical in
developmental prosopagnosia. Is the case of YT exceptional? We
present additional cases of individuals who have been profoundly
impaired in face recognition throughout life. They too had no
differential evoked responses to faces compared with other objects.
Our results support the view that the early extrastriate
face-specific evoked responses recorded in humans reflect a crucial
stage in specialized face processing, allowing the remarkable
expertise for faces in most of us.
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