Severe developmental prosopagnosia in a child with superior intellect

Developmental prosopagnosia, a Lifelong inability to learn and recognize fa miliar faces, has rarely been reported, and there are even fewer cases that have been studied during childhood. Of the cases studied during childhood, significant "apperceptive" features to the face recognition defect have be en noted. We had an opportunity to conduct extensive standard and experimen tal neuropsychological, psychophysiological, and neuroanatomical studies in a five-year-old child with severe developmental prosopagnosia. The subject was intellectually gifted (FSIQ = 130), but had a marked discrepancy betwe en verbal and nonverbal abilities (VIQ = 140, PIQ = 110). Although some vis ual perceptual weaknesses were apparent, the subject's face recognition def ect was found to cnform most closely to the "associative" type, and he did not have visual recognition deficits for any categories of nonunique entiti es. A novel finding was that the child's covert recognition of familiar fac es based on an autonomic index was normal, suggesting that as in some adult -onset cases, the brain is capable of acquiring some information about fami liar faces, even without conscious recognition. The child also had normal j udgments of facial emotional expressions. Our report extends the understand ing of the neuropsychological features of developmental prosopagnosia, and may help narrow the search for neuroanatomical correlates of this condition , which have yet to be identified.