UCL Discovery

Abstract

We report on neuropsychological testing done with a family in which many members report severe face recognition impairments. These ten individuals are high functioning in everyday life and performed normally on tests of low-level vision and high-level cognition. In contrast, they showed clear deficits with tests requiring face memory and judgments of facial similarity. They do not show deficits with all aspects of higher level visual processing as all tested performed normally on a challenging facial emotion recognition task and on a global-local letter identification task. On object memory tasks requiring recognition of particular cars and guns, they showed significant deficits so their recognition impairments are not restricted to facial identity. These results strongly suggest the existence of a genetic condition leading to a selective deficit of visual recognition.