The Face Specificity of Lifelong Prosopagnosia

Lifelong prosopagnosia has emerged as a key testing ground for theories of visual system organization, as well as the development and the emergence of neural specificity in the human brain. A key open issue concerns whether individuals who have lifelong prosopagnosia also experience difficulty with recognizing non-face stimuli. This volume features a thorough review of the congenital prosopagnosia literature and critical commentaries by the leading experts in the field. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology.

Introduction: The face specificity of lifelong prosopagnosia1. Congenital prosopagnosia without object agnosia? A literature review2. Association vs dissociation and setting appropriate criteria for object agnosia3. Should developmental prosopagnosia, developmental body agnosia, and developmental object agnosia be considered independent neurodevelopmental conditions?4. Decoupling category level and perceptual similarity in congenital prosopagnosia5. On defining and interpreting dissociations6. Commonly associated face and object recognition impairments have implications for the cognitive architecture7. A possible neuronal account for the behavioural heterogeneity in congenital prosopagnosia8. Congenital prosopagnosia: Deficit diagnosis and beyond9. What do associations and dissociations between face and object recognition abilities tell us about the domain-generality of face processing?10. The power of how—lessons learned from neuropsychology and face processing11. Face specificity of developmental prosopagnosia, moving beyond the debate on face specificity12. Objects and faces, faces and objects….13. On the use of cognitive neuropsychological methods in developmental disorders14. Prosopdysgnosia? What could it tell us about the neural organization of face and object recognition?15. Over time, the right results will emerge

Bradford Z. Mahon is based at Carnegie Mellon University, USA.