Abstract
It has been known for a century that damage to an area within the fusiform gyrus of the right occipito-temporal cortex results in a peculiar syndrome—prosopagnosia. The patient, otherwise normal, cannot recognize familiar faces. This area was labeled Fusiform Face Area (FFA). Modern brain imaging studies confirmed FFA’s function: all people in the normal population activate the FFA during face recognition tests.
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Notes
- 1.
This theory is psychological; it is not directly related (congruent) to brain functional differentiation with its three dimensions.
- 2.
Occasional feelings of false familiarity with unknown faces are not uncommon in normal people, though they are usually faint and are rapidly acknowledged as a trivial error (Young, Hay, & Ellis, 1985).
- 3.
If the left hemisphere has a compulsive desire to rationalize, the right hemisphere has a compulsive need to identify.
- 4.
To say a prosopagnostic person can understand emotional expression from a face is not fully correct. He is able to understand the conventional part of emotion. The uniqueness of Mr. N’s smile is made up of more than just fixed-in-evolution, “conventional” facial movements. Such movements belong to the sensory-motor and gnostic–praxic level. The thalamic level also contributes background movements for emotion, reflecting one’s internal state and idiosyncratic RH experience. These thalamic emotional expressions will be discussed in Chaps. 7 and 8.
- 5.
I used the term superior temporal gyrus (STG) in Chap. 3, not superior temporal sulcus (STS). In the literature, both terms are used interchangeably, referring to the similar functions. It seems that STS is more specific to moving eyes and mouth.
- 6.
Using brain imaging split from the tradition of various schools of psychiatry and neuropsychology leads to such a conclusion where perceptual visual deficit or genes of “not looking at eyes” are the etiological determinants of a mental disorder.
- 7.
To determine those areas of the face that were in fact relied upon by the subjects in this study, the authors used the “Bubbles” technique, analyzing then the areas of the face that were revealed as a function of participants’ accuracy.
- 8.
This finding is very interesting by itself. Normal fixation on the left eye, i.e., the left visual field, indicates better use of facial information by the right hemisphere than by the left in autistic participants.
- 9.
In this chapter, I did not analyze the amygdala’s functioning in the autistic brain’s face processing network.
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Glezerman, T.B. (2013). How Autistic Persons Perceive Faces (Cerebral Organization of Face Recognition and Autism). In: Autism and the Brain. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4112-0_4
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