Impairments in Face Perception

Anecdotal reports obtained from three individuals with prosopagnosia, all of whom have participated in an investigation, capture the essence of their impairment. This article focuses on the contrast between two prominent forms of prosopagnosia, one of which results from an acquired brain insult in an otherwise premorbidly normal individual and a second which appears to be lifelong and occurs in the absence of any obvious brain damage, at least as evident on conventional brain imaging. It reviews two central issues: the first concerns the similarities and differences in the psychological representations of faces in acquired prosopagnosia (AP) and congenital prosopagnosia (CP), and the second concerns the nature of the underlying neural representations of faces in these two populations. Some well-established overlapping behavioral characteristics are identified.