Perceptual and anatomic patterns of selective deficits in facial identity and expression processing

• Published in: Neuropsychologia Vol. 49; no. 12; pp. 3188 - 3200
• Main Authors: Fox, Christopher J., Hanif, Hashim M., Iaria, Giuseppe, Duchaine, Bradley C., Barton, Jason J.S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.10.2011; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Adult and adolescent clinical studies; Aged; Biological and medical sciences; Brain Injuries - complications; Brain Mapping; Deficits; Discrimination (Psychology); Disorders of higher nervous function. Focal brain diseases. Central vestibular syndrome and deafness. Brain stem syndromes; Dissociation; Emotions - physiology; Expression; Face perception; Facial Expression; Female; fMRI; Humans; Identity; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Medical sciences; Middle Aged; Nervous system (semeiology, syndromes); Neurology; Neuropsychological Tests; Occipital Lobe - blood supply; Occipital Lobe - physiopathology; Organic mental disorders. Neuropsychology; Oxygen - blood; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; Photic Stimulation; Prosopagnosia; Prosopagnosia - etiology; Prosopagnosia - pathology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Stroke; Temporal Lobe - blood supply; Temporal Lobe - physiopathology; Vascular diseases and vascular malformations of the nervous system; Young Adult; Deficits; fMRI; Face perception; Stroke; Expression; Dissociation; Prosopagnosia; Identity; Affect affectivity; Emotional expression; Vision disorder; Central nervous system; Cardiovascular disease; Encephalon; Vascular disease; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Face; Cerebrovascular disease; Human; Nervous system diseases; Visual agnosia; Emotion emotionality; Experimental study; Nuclear magnetic resonance imaging; Cerebral disorder; Eye disease; Vision; Central nervous system disease; Stimulus identification; Facial expression; Functional imaging
• ISSN: 0028-3932; 1873-3514
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.07.018

► We developed a non-verbal test of identity and expression perception, balanced for the level of difficulty. ► We correlated perceptual impairments with structural and functional lesions using fMRI. ► Selective identity impairments were seen in four patients independent of damage to the OFA/FFA. ► We present the first evidence of expression impairment following functional damage to pSTS. Whether a single perceptual process or separate and possibly independent processes support facial identity and expression recognition is unclear. We used a morphed-face discrimination test to examine sensitivity to facial expression and identity information in patients with occipital or temporal lobe damage, and structural and functional MRI to correlate behavioral deficits with damage to the core regions of the face-processing network. We found selective impairments of identity perception in two patients with right inferotemporal lesions and two prosopagnosic patients with damage limited to the anterior temporal lobes. Of these four patients one exhibited damage to the right fusiform and occipital face areas, while the remaining three showed sparing of these regions. Thus impaired identity perception can occur with damage not only to the fusiform and occipital face areas, but also to other medial occipitotemporal structures that likely form part of a face recognition network. Impaired expression perception was seen in the fifth patient with damage affecting the face-related portion of the posterior superior temporal sulcus. This subject also had difficulty in discriminating identity when irrelevant variations in expression needed to be discounted. These neuropsychological and neuroimaging data provide evidence to complement models which address the separation of expression and identity perception within the face-processing network.