The Matching of Famous and Unknown Faces, Given Either the Internal or the External Features: A Study on Patients with Unilateral Brain Lesions

Abstract

On the view that prosopagnosia represents a specific pathophysiologically based inability to recognize familiar faces (Bodamer, 1947), two basic questions arise. First, there is no unequivocal agreement as to whether a unilateral lesion is sufficient to cause the syndrome (c.f. De Renzi, this volume; Meadows, 1974; Damasio and Damasio, this volume). The second question is concerned with functional mechanisms: if faces are processed differently with respect to other visual stimuli, where do these differences occur and what effect will disruption at different stages of processing have? Relevant information on both topics, lateralization and process analysis, can be expected from studies of patients with relatively circumscribed and stable brain lesions. The underlying premiss is that if this severe and comparatively rare inability to recognize faces has a specific neuroanatomical substrate, then less flagrant forms of face recognition impairment may be found in larger numbers of patients with cerebral damage (Benton and van Allen, 1968).