Congenital and Acquired Prosopagnosia: Flip Sides of the Same Coin?

Both congenital prosopagnosia (CP) and acquired prosopagnosia (AP) are characterized by a deficit in recognizing faces, but the former is a failure to acquire face-processing skills in the absence of any obvious sensory, neural, or cognitive disorder, while the latter is the loss of skill as a result of explicit brain injury. Whether the mechanisms affected in CP and AP are the same is not yet clear. For example, patients with CP are better at deriving emotional information from faces, and all patients with AP show abnormal electrophysiological (ERP), magnetoencephalographic (MEG), and neuroimaging profiles, whereas this is not always the case for CP. Studies that directly compare the detailed behavioral and neural signatures of CP and AP will be informative with respect to uncovering the fundamental sequence of acquisition or ordering of the componentialprocesses associated with face recognition.