Developmental prosopagnosia: Should it be taken at face value?

This study presents a rare case of developmental prosopagnosia, Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed no overt brain abnormalities, EP' s basic visual skills and visual memory were intact, as was his ability to judge age, sex and expression from faces, identify facial parts, and make f ace/non-face decisions, EP was impaired at recognizing famous and very fami liar faces and describing visual images of famous faces, He also displayed an anterograde memory impairment for recently studied faces, and performed poorly on tests of unfamiliar face matching, most notably for chimeric face s, It is suggested that EP may be deficient at encoding configural represen tations of faces. EP appears to have a 'pure' (i.e. specific to faces) pros opagnosia, as he shows normal object recognition from unusual viewpoints, g ood gestalt completion for objects, but not for faces, normal visual imager y for objects but not for faces, a disruption of the inversion effect for f aces but not for houses, and performs within the normal range on tests of w ithin-category discriminations, even with unique exemplars of object catego ries such as famous buildings.