Lange J, de Lussanet M H E, Kuhlmann S, Zimmermann, A, Lappe M, Zwitserlood P, Dobel C
Forschungsartikel (Zeitschrift) | Peer reviewedProsopagnosia is a deficit in recognizing people from their faces. Acquired prosopagnosia results after brain damage, developmental or congenital prosopagnosia (CP) is not caused by brain lesion, but has presumably been present from early childhood onwards. Since other sensory, perceptual, and cognitive abilities are largely spared, CP is considered to be a domain-specific deficit, limited to face processing. We challenge this position by showing that prosopagnosia is accompanied by deficits in other domains. Given that recent behavioral and imaging studies indicate a close relationship of face and biological-motion perception in healthy adults, we hypothesized that biological motion processing should be impaired in CP. Five individuals with CP and ten matched healthy controls were tested with diverse biological-motion stimuli and tasks. Four of the CP individuals showed severe deficits in biological-motion processing while one performed consistently in the lower range of the controls. These findings indicate that the perception of biological motion posits the strongest challenge for a domain-specific mechanism, and that a common neural network is involved in the perception of faces and biological motion.
de Lussanet De La Sablonière, Marc | Professur für Allgemeine Psychologie (Prof. Lappe) |
Lappe, Markus | Professur für Allgemeine Psychologie (Prof. Lappe) |
Zwitserlood, Pienie | Professur für Psycholinguistik und kognitive Neurowissenschaft (Prof. Zwitserlood) |