OBJECTS AND FACES - AN INVERTED FACE AND OBJECT EFFECT COMBINED IN A CASE OF PROSOPAGNOSIA

Prosopagnosia has been advanced as the potentially strongest basis for claiming the existence of a face specific neural system. However, mos t patients reported so far as suffering from prosopagnosia also exhibi t visual object agnosia, or alexia or both (see Farah, 1991 for an ove rview). This notion of an autonomous processing system contrasts with the view that prosopagnosia is a more extreme manifestation of object recognition problems that concern perceptually very demanding stimuli and a deficit that will occur in cases where visually similar stimuli have to be discriminated for uniqueness (Damasio, 1990). We report her e an investigation of a patient suffering from prosopagnosia in which we concentrated on stimulus domain (objects vs faces) and orientation (upright vs inverted) as a means of disentangling prosopagnosia in rel ation to visual object recognition deficits.