LECTURE 6: PROSOPAGNOSIA & FACE

PROCESSING
WHAT MAKES FACES SO SPECIAL? (4 ARGUMENTS)
- The ontogenetic (developmental) argument
- The inversion effects
- The specificity of prosopagnosia
- The activation of specific brain regions in face processing tasks

1 THE DEVELOPMENT ARGUMENT (ONTOGENETIC)

Goren, Sarty & Wu (1975) Pediatrics:
- NEWBORNS show visually follow schematic faces for LONGER periods at
birth compared to non-faces
- Median effect observed after 9 minutes of life
- Could be because of adaptive factor or plasticity
Meltzoff & Moore (1979) Science:
- Between 12 and 21 days of age, babies imitate facial expressions of adults
(opening their mouths, sticking out their tongues)
Farroni et al. (2001) PNAS:
- Between 2-5 days, babies prefer a face that looks at them
- Direction gaze & time of babies looking at the face = more attracted to face
that looking at them

Johnson et al (1991) Cognition:

- NEWBORNS follow a schematic face for a greater distance than non-faces 30

minutes after birth
- Present stimulus & make it pass progressively across the visual field = look at
how far the babies would follow the stimulus
- “we born with attraction to faces”
Bushnell (2001) Inf Child Develop:
- Between 12 and 36 hours, newborns begin to recognise their mother’s face
- Prefer to look at their mother’s faces than a stranger’s
- But they have to have been exposed for a sufficiently long period (>6h)
- Highly correlated (hours spent with mother & preference for mothers)
- Identifying other individual quickly on the basis of facial characteristics
- Babies very quickly in picking out faces and identifying the species of our kind
2 THE INVERSION EFFECT
Yin (1969) – in adults
- An inverted face is not recognised easily, worse in faces than other objects
- Subjects had to identify faces, houses & planes
- An effect of inversion was more marked for face recognition than other
categories (RED = down, YELLOW = upright)
- The inversion effect is presented for familiar faces as well
- The presentation is very brief – less than a second
Thompson P (1980):
- The “Thatcher illusion” shows that upside down faces are processed
differently
- Practically devilish = inverted the eyes & mouth, not notice the “inverted”
parts when upside-down.
Diamond & Carey (1986) o A patient, expert in cars who could still distinguish them, but could
not distinguish faces
- We must distinguish differences affecting parts or the whole - McNeil & Warrington (1991)
(configurational): o A farmer could name his sheep but not humans
o Objects might differ according to their parts (houses) = 1ST ORDER
- De Renzi (1986)
DIFFERENCES o Patient who could recognise their personal belongings (keys,
o Objects can have similar parts and differ only in terms of their
wallets) among others, impaired in recognising faces
configuration (faces) = 2ND ORDER or CONFIGURATIONAL
DIFFERENCES Farah, Klein & Levison (1995)
 Same elements that make up the stimulus, but there is
relative different between two stimuli - Patient LH (prosopagnosic) and control subjects were tested in the
 If you try to differentiate the configurational differences, identification of faces (RED) and glasses (YELLOW)
more difficult when it is inverted
- Configurational differences may be processed in a global manner (holistic)
- Processed in different way by different areas of brain = faces are bit different
in term of the way it is processed

3 THE SPECIFICITY OF PROSOPAGNOSIA (FACE BLINDNESS)

- Prosopagnosia = patient who had a lesion & could not recognise familiar face
- (Right) ventral temporo-occipital lesions = specific deficits in face (but not
object) recognition
- LH was worse than controls for faces but not glasses
- Visual deficit, deficit in recognising different exemplars within the same
category

4 BRAIN AREAS RESPONDING TO FACES

Kanwisher et al
- Sometimes, object agnosia can be associated, but there are case of pure
- Used fMRI to localise regions processing faces
prosopagnosia
o Comparing brain activation for faces and objects
- When have prosopagnosia, use various cues and techniques to recognise the
person (detail of hair, moles, etc)  Activation in the right fusiform gyrus
- Sergent & Signoret (1992)
  The opposite contrast (objects > faces) shows bilateral
activation in (bilateral) adjacent regions (object specific?)
 There is a double dissociation for these stimuli
o To be sure that this was not related to low-level features
(luminance, etc) they compared faces and scrambled faces
 Still observed activation in the (right) fusiform gyrus
o To exclude differences due to intra-category vs inter-category =
faces and houses were compared with rest (fixation)
 Still activation was observed in the (right) fusiform gyrus
o To exclude an effect of animate vs inanimate stimuli (or biological vs
man-made) = comparison of faces and hands
 The (right) fusiform gyrus was still activated Gauthier et al (1999) Nature Neuroscience

- fMRI: same/different task

THE FUSIFORM GYRUS
o 5 subjects were asked to compare 2 successive stimuli (faces or
- The FFA or “fusiform face area” is therefore selective for faces processing Greebles, upright or upside-down = 4 conditions)
- FFA activated on the right in 5/10 right-handed subjects and bilaterally in the o 1. Before training & 2. After extensive training
5 others
- In 2 left handers = 1 showed left FFA activation and the other bilateral

- Before training, FFA reacted more to (upright) faces than to Greebles (right >
left)
Gautheir & Tarr (1997) “GREEBLES”

- is FFA specific to faces or visual expertise?

- They develop the Greebles, stimuli that must be processed configurally
 Rhodes et al (2004) J Cog Neurosci

- Therefore, experts (e.g., for butterflies) should show FFA activation for
butterflies?
- Rhodes et al compared brain activation for faces, butterflies & objects (using
fMRI) in butterfly experts & novices
- Task: (1) look passively or (2) individuate (identify individuals)
- Right FFA shows greater activity for faces than butterflies for novices, as well
as trained novices and butterfly experts
- With training, the right FFA reacted more and more to the Greebles

- With greater expertise, the right fusiform gyrus no longer responds only to - Therefore (according to Rhodes et al) FFA activity:
faces but also to Greebles o Is not activated by the identifications of members of a category
- Novices: FFA respond to faces but not to Greebles (individuation)
- Experts: FFA also responds to Greebles o Is not link to visual expertise for a category of stimuli (here
butterflies)
o Is specific to faces

Hoffman & Haxby et al (2000)

- Unfortunately, most experiments use static faces

- Hoffman & Haxby performed an fMRI study looking at dynamic aspects of
faces: namely gaze (in addition to identity
 Phillips et al (1998)

- In another study, Phillips et al (1998) tried to identify regions responding to

fear and disgust (expressions are changing features of a face)

THE FUSIFORM GYRUS & THE INTERIOR OCCIPITAL GYRUS

- Respond to identify an independent of gaze

Haxby et al (2000)

- Proposed a model (core system) for face processing

Adolphs et al (1994) Bentin el al (1996)

- A rare patient (SM) presenting a bilateral amygdala lesion was unable to
recognise fearful faces
- Yet he could recognise identity (no prosopagnosia)
- So, emotion and identity recognition are dissociable
TEMPORAL DYNAMICS OF FACE PROCESSING
- Evoked potential studies with faces have demonstrated a specific component
for facial encoding: N170
- Experiment 1: comparison of ERP to faces, cars, scrambled faces and
scrambled cars
o They observed a negative deflection at 170ms (on temporal
electrodes – here T5 and T6 – for faces but not for other stimuli
o They call it the 170

Jeffreys (1996)

- In 1989, Botzel et al (a) and then Jeffreys et al (b et c) find a specific

component for faces:
- The VPP (vertex positive potential) = positive wave between 150 and 210ms
- In fact, VPP = N170

- Experiment 2: to ensure that the N170 is linked to human faces not animal
faces, familiarity or body parts, = compare hands, furniture, faces & animal
faces
 - Experiment 3: in order to verify that the N170 is linked to global processing
of a face, upright and upside-down faces were compared

- Experiment 4: to determine whether body parts alone can produce the - Again, faces & inverted faces produced the greatest N170
N170, a 4th experiment compared faces with eyes, noses and mouths in
isolation

Itier & Taylor (2004)

Eimer (2000)
- Compared ERPs for 9 categories of stimuli
- Eimer investigated ERPs for familiar and unfamiliar faces, along with houses
in healthy controls
 - In summary, structural encoding of faces occurs at around 170ms
- Identity recognition seems to arise after 400ms
- Prosopagnosia cancels the N170 as well as the later components
- HOWEVER, some prosopagnosics show an N170 for faces = could be a
difference between associative and apperceptive forms of prosopagnosia

De Wall & Pokorny (2008)

- For other animals, faces may not be the only way peers are recognised
- Monkeys also recognise their peers from their behinds
- Familiar faces = central negativity at 400ms (N400f) and a positivity around
600ms (P600f)

- In prosopagnosic patient (PHD):