THE NEURAL SUBSTRATES OF FACE PROCESSING MODELS - A REVIEW

Prosopagnosia is an impairment of the ability to process visual inform ation derived from faces. A number of models of face processing have b een proposed, using methods and models developed in cognitive psycholo gy, to explain the different forms of prosopagnosia. The proposed subc omponents of these models are based almost entirely on behavioural dat a from prosopagnosic human subjects. This paper reviews the physiologi cal data on face processing, primarily obtained from single-cell recor ding from neurons in nonhuman primates, and relates this to a model of cognitive face processing. This allows localisation of the different processing modules in functional structures within the brain of higher primates, including man.