4/10/23, 12:21 AM The Fregoli delusion: a disorder of person identification and tracking - PubMed

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Review Top Cogn Sci. 2014 Oct;6(4):615-31. doi: 10.1111/tops.12108. Epub 2014 Sep 13.
The Fregoli delusion: a disorder of person
identification and tracking
Robyn Langdon 1 , Emily Connaughton, Max Coltheart
Affiliations
PMID: 25219764 DOI: 10.1111/tops.12108
Free article
Abstract
Fregoli delusion is the mistaken belief that some person currently present in the deluded person's
environment (typically a stranger) is a familiar person in disguise. The stranger is believed to be
psychologically identical to this known person (who is not present) even though the deluded
person perceives the physical appearance of the stranger as being different from the known
person's typical appearance. To gain a deeper understanding of this contradictory error in the
normal system for tracking and identifying known persons, we conducted a detailed survey of all
the Fregoli cases reported in the literature since the seminal Courbon and Fail (1927) paper. Our
preliminary reading of these cases revealed a notable lack of definitional clarity. So, we first
formulated a classification scheme of different person misidentification delusions so as to identify
those cases that qualified as instances of Fregoli according to the above characterization: the
mistaken belief that a known person is present in the environment in a different guise to his or her
typical appearance. We identified 38 clear cases of this type and set out to answer a series of
questions motivated by current hypotheses about the origin of the Fregoli delusion. We asked
whether the patients misidentified particular strangers, made reference to the misidentified known
persons using wigs or plastic surgery (or other techniques to disguise their appearance),
misidentified many different strangers or only one, showed other symptoms (in particular, other
misidentification delusions), and made inferences about the motives of the known persons in
disguise. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for current hypotheses
concerning the origin of the Fregoli delusion.
Keywords: Face processing; Fregoli delusion; Misidentification delusions; Person identity
processing; Person perception; Person tracking.
Copyright © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

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