Paradoxical configuration effects for faces and objects in prosopagnosia

Selective impairment in recognition of faces (prosopagnosia) has been advan ced as an argument for a brain module dedicated to face processing and focu sing on the specific configural properties of faces. Loss of the inversion effect supposedly strengthened the argument ([10]: de Gelder B, Bachoud-Lev i AC, Degos JD. Inversion superiority in visual agnosia may be common to a variety of orientation polarised objects besides faces. Vision Research, 19 98;38:2855-61; [20]: Farah MJ, Wilson K, Drain H, Tanaka J. The inverted fa ce inversion effect in prosopagnosia: Evidence for mandatory, face-specific perceptual mechanisms. Vision Research 1995b;35:2089-93). The present stud y of prosopagnosic patient LH reports that he has lost the normal pattern o f superior performance with upright faces and objects and shows instead par adoxical inversion effect for faces but also for objects. Experiment 2 inve stigated whether LH's use of features based route for processing upright ob jects would be hindered by the whole-based encoding when processing upright objects. The data show the same context effect for objects as was found fo r faces. Therefore the inversion effect does not present decisive evidence for the existence of a face module. Moreover, the importance of configurati on-based recognition known to be crucial for face processing, must also be taken seriously for object recognition. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.