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Early commitment of neural substrates for face recognition
Abstract
We present evidence of a striking failure of plasticity in the neural substrates of face recognition, which suggests that the distinction between faces and other objects, and the localisation of faces relative to other objects, is fully determined prior to any postnatal experience. A boy who sustained brain damage at 1 day of age has the classic lesions and behavioural profile of adult-acquired prosopagnosia. He has profoundly impaired face recognition, whereas his recognition of objects is much less impaired. This implies that the human genome contains sufficiently explicit information about faces and nonface objects, or visual features by which they can be distinguished, that experience with these categories is not necessary for their functional delineation and differential brain localisation.
... It is also worth noting that, although fMRI results indicate a competition between face and word selectivity within the adjacent cortex, we have no behavioral evidence to suggest that either word or face recognition is compromised as a result of face lateralization to the same (LH) hemisphere. Given that limited recovery has been noted in individuals with a lesion or resection of the visual cortex early in life (Farah et al., 2000), it is striking that U.D. had normal face recognition, as well as form and object perception. ...
... The absence of prosopagnosia in U.D. challenges the importance of the right ventral visual pathway in face processing (Kanwisher, 2010) and the evidence that the right VOTC damage may be sufficient to produce prosopagnosia (De Renzi, 1986). U.D.'s normal face recognition also challenges the conclusion that face selectivity and its anatomical localization is genetically coded and that subsequent compensation is not possible (Farah et al., 2000). In contrast, our results favor dynamic reorganization and fine-tuning in the functional architecture of cognition over development (Johnson, 2011) and argue for the critical role of experience in shaping the underlying circuitry . ...
... For example, better prognosis is predicted by a better pre-surgical cognitive profile, by more circumscribed cortical resection, and by chronic etiology. For example, a slow-growing tumor potentially affords greater opportunity for plasticity than an acute incident such as post-natal stroke (Mancini et al., 1994) or meningitis (Farah et al., 2000). Moreover, the earlier the resection the better (Bourne, 2010). ...
Investigations of functional (re)organization in children who have undergone large cortical resections offer a unique opportunity to elucidate the nature and extent of cortical plasticity. We report findings from a 3-year investigation of a child, U.D., who underwent surgical removal of the right occipital and posterior temporal lobes at age 6 years 9 months. Relative to controls, post-surgically, U.D. showed age-appropriate intellectual performance and visuoperceptual face and object recognition skills. Using fMRI at five different time points, we observed a persistent hemianopia and no visual field remapping. In category-selective visual cortices, however, object- and scene-selective regions in the intact left hemisphere were stable early on, but regions subserving face and word recognition emerged later and evinced competition for cortical representation. These findings reveal alterations in the selectivity and topography of category-selective regions when confined to a single hemisphere and provide insights into dynamic functional changes in extrastriate cortical architecture.
... To the extent that the organization is innately prewired and that a single region has a singular function, restitution of function following damage becomes less likely i.e. if the function is solely a property of a particular area, it is less likely that another area can assume this function. Farah et al. (2000) adopted just this view in the study of Adam who sustained bilateral lesions to VOTC (infarction of posterior cerebral arteries) at day 1of age. At age 16, Adam was profoundly 8 impaired at recognizing faces. ...
... One strong case of early onset of prosopagnosia, as mentioned above, is Adam who contracted streptococcal meningitis on Day 1 of life with lesions affecting VOTC bilaterally (Farah et al., 2000;Farah and Rabinowitz, 2003). When tested at 16 years of age, Adam showed a profound impairment in face recognition (unable to identify a single face from his favorite TV show) and a moderate deficit in object recognition (Naming: nonliving things 75% correct; living things 40% correct, see Table 1). ...
... In light of the prominent and persistent prosopagnosia, Farah et al. (2000) stated that there is an early commitment of neural substrate to face recognition and that, because no other region of cortex was able to compensate for the VOTC lesions, recovery of function was not possible. We note, however, that Adam's bilateral lesion resulted in many elementary visual deficits such as esotropia, amblyopia, reduced acuity and visual field abnormalities, and thus the lack of reliable input, rather than a fundamental limit on plasticity per se, may have hindered Adam's development of face and object recognition. ...
Understanding the nature and extent of neural plasticity in humans remains a key challenge for neuroscience. Importantly, however, a precise characterization of plasticity and its underlying mechanism has the potential to enable new approaches for enhancing reorganization of cortical function. Investigations of the impairment and subsequent recovery of cognitive and perceptual functions following early-onset cortical lesions in humans provide a unique opportunity to elucidate how the brain changes, adapts, and reorganizes. Specifically, here, we focus on restitution of visual function, and we review the findings on plasticity and re-organization of the ventral occipital temporal cortex (VOTC) in published reports of 46 patients with a lesion to or resection of the visual cortex early in life. Findings reveal that a lesion to the VOTC results in a deficit that affects the visual recognition of more than one category of stimuli (faces, objects and words). In addition, the majority of pediatric patients show limited recovery over time, especially those in whom deficits in low-level vision also persist. Last, given that neither the equipotentiality nor the modularity view on plasticity was clearly supported, we suggest some intermediate possibilities in which some plasticity may be evident but that this might depend on the area that was affected, its maturational trajectory as well as its structural and functional connectivity constraints. Finally, we offer suggestions for future research that can elucidate plasticity further.
... The maturational viewpoint posits that this increased tuning is determined genetically whereas the constructivist view posits that increased specialization is accomplished through Hebbian learning and dendritic growth, but not synaptic loss. Although Johnson (Johnson 2005(Johnson , 2011 has suggested that there is little neurobiological evidence for the constructivist account, Farah et al. (2000) provided evidence for a strong form of the maturational viewpoint in their study of a boy who acquired a lesion at 1 day of age and showed the classic neurobehavioral profile of prosopagnosia when tested at age 16: deficits in face but not object processing and damage to bilateral occipital and occipito-temporal cortex. They concluded that "prior to visual experience, we are destined to carry out face and object recognition with different neural substrates. ...
... In one sense, specialized maturation could indicate a developmental process that unfolds gradually over time and is immune to functional reorganization with development, as predicted by the Maturational viewpoint (as discussed in Johnson 2005;Joseph et al. 2011). The strong form of this framework suggests that the specialized function of a particular brain region is determined at birth, and others have made a similar argument with respect to face processing (Farah et al. 2000). However, face specialization did not emerge until adulthood in the frontal regions and the bilateral thalamus and face specialization was present in older children in the right AMG, right FFA, right pSTS. ...
IntroductionFace processing undergoes significant developmental change with age. Two kinds of developmental changes in face specialization were examined in this study: specialized maturation, or the continued tuning of a region to faces but little change in the tuning to other categories; and competitive interactions, or the continued tuning to faces accompanied by decreased tuning to nonfaces (i.e., pruning). Methods
Using fMRI, in regions where adults showed a face preference, a face- and object-specialization index were computed for younger children (5-8 years), older children (9-12 years) and adults (18-45 years). The specialization index was scaled to each subject's maximum activation magnitude in each region to control for overall age differences in the activation level. ResultsAlthough no regions showed significant face specialization in the younger age group, regions strongly associated with social cognition (e.g., right posterior superior temporal sulcus, right inferior orbital cortex) showed specialized maturation, in which tuning to faces increased with age but there was no pruning of nonface responses. Conversely, regions that are associated with more basic perceptual processing or motor mirroring (right middle temporal cortex, right inferior occipital cortex, right inferior frontal opercular cortex) showed competitive interactions in which tuning to faces was accompanied by pruning of object responses with age. Conclusions
The overall findings suggest that cortical maturation for face processing is regional-specific and involves both increased tuning to faces and diminished response to nonfaces. Regions that show competitive interactions likely support a more generalized function that is co-opted for face processing with development, whereas regions that show specialized maturation increase their tuning to faces, potentially in an activity-dependent, experience-driven manner.
... The comparably larger detriments for (frequently encountered) faces caused by stimulus inversion (i.e., the face inversion effect; [4][5][6]), and more efficient processing of faces from the same ethnical background (i.e., the other-race effect, ORE; [7][8][9]) demonstrate the crucial role of experience for face processing skills [10][11][12]. However, early proposals suggested that some degree of hard-wiring exists for face recognition [13][14][15], as supported by more recent studies of its heritability. These studies, involving large cohorts of twins [16,17], indicate a genetic basis for face recognition, which is a highly specific ability that is uncorrelated with general visual and verbal recognition performance. ...
... SMs' fixation patterns were not less correlated with the controls' than the controls between themselves (SM1 vs. controls: .34±.06; SM2 vs. controls: .27±.06; controls vs. controls: .19±.02). However, SMs exhibited a larger average number of fixation clusters than controls (SM1: 20; SM2: 19.5; controls' range: [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18], indicating that SMs attended to significantly more faces than the controls. Experiment 2: Western Caucasian and Eastern Asian face-name learning. ...
Humans have a natural expertise in recognizing faces. However, the nature of the interaction between this critical visual biological skill and memory is yet unclear. Here, we had the unique opportunity to test two individuals who have had exceptional success in the World Memory Championships, including several world records in face-name association memory. We designed a range of face processing tasks to determine whether superior/expert face memory skills are associated with distinctive perceptual strategies for processing faces. Superior memorizers excelled at tasks involving associative face-name learning. Nevertheless, they were as impaired as controls in tasks probing the efficiency of the face system: face inversion and the other-race effect. Super memorizers did not show increased hippocampal volumes, and exhibited optimal generic eye movement strategies when they performed complex multi-item face-name associations. Our data show that the visual computations of the face system are not malleable and are robust to acquired expertise involving extensive training of associative memory.
... research has found that the medial temporal lobe including the hippocampus may be sensitive to 89 the memorability of images ( An alternative hypothesis is that children possess adult-like susceptibility to the 99 memorability effect early on, and we would expect young children to have similar memory 100 patterns to adults. Previous research has found that infants are born with capabilities to process 101 faces (Farah et al., 2000;Tzourio-Mazoyer et al., 2002), scenes (Kamps et al., 2020), and edges 102 (Kessen et al., 1972). These commonalities in visual processing between newborns and adults 103 indicate early sensitivity to certain visual categories and properties, occurring in late visual areas 104 in the brain (i.e., the inferotemporal cortex One power of memorability is that memorability scores are highly consistent across 119 different tasks and observers (Bainbridge, 2020;Goetschalckx et al., 2019). ...
Adults have been shown to consistently remember and forget certain images despite large individual differences, suggesting a population-wide sensitivity to an image’s intrinsic memorability—a measure of how successfully an image is remembered. While a decade of research has focused on image memorability among adults, the developmental trajectory of these consistencies in memory is understudied. Here, we investigate by what age children gain adult-like sensitivity to the image memorability effect. We utilized data from Saragosa-Harris et al. (2021), where 137 children aged between 3 and 5 years old encoded animal-scene image pairs and then after a 5-min, 24-hr, or 1-week delay performed a cued recognition task for each scene target given its animal cue. We tested adults’ memory of the same scene images using ResMem (Needell & Bainbridge, 2022), a pretrained deep neural network that predicts adult image memorability scores, and using an online behavioral continuous recognition task (N = 116). Results showed that ResMem predictions, as a proxy of adults’ memory, predicted scene memory of children by the age of 4 and were the most predictive of children’s memory across ages after a long, 1-week delay. Children at age 3 show nonadult-like consistent memory patterns, implying that the nonadult-like memory patterns were not due to poor memory performance. Instead, 3-year-olds may have consistently used certain visual memory strategies that become less optimal as they age. Our results suggest that adult-like sensitivity to image memorability emerges by the age of 4 through experience.
... In fact, studies find mixed evidence of functional reorganization across the literature. For instance, many studies find no evidence of recovery of ventral functions, such as word and face recognition, following damage in childhood (Farah et al., 2000;Hadjikhani and de Gelder, 2002), even when the damage occurred on day 1 of life. By contrast, other studies find successful reorganization and normal recognition performance (Cohen et al., 2004;Mancini et al., 1994), even when the disruptions occurred late in childhood (for review, see Liu and Behrmann, 2017;Vargha-Khadem and Polkey, 1992). ...
Hemispherectomy is a surgical procedure in which an entire hemisphere of a patient’s brain is resected or functionally disconnected to manage seizures in individuals with drug-resistant epilepsy. Despite the extensive loss of both ventral and dorsal visual pathways in one hemisphere, pediatric patients who have undergone hemispherectomy show a remarkably high degree of perceptual function across many domains. In the current study, we sought to understand the extent to which functions of the ventral and dorsal visual pathways reorganize to the contralateral hemisphere following childhood hemispherectomy. To this end, we collected fMRI data from an equal number of left and right hemispherectomy patients who completed tasks that typically elicit lateralized responses from the ventral or the dorsal pathway, namely, word (left ventral), face (right ventral), tool (left dorsal), and global form (right dorsal) perception. Overall, there was greater evidence of functional reorganization in the ventral pathway than in the dorsal pathway. Importantly, because ventral and dorsal reorganization was tested within the very same patients, these results cannot be explained by idiosyncratic factors such as disease etiology, age at the time of surgery, or age at testing. These findings suggest that because the dorsal pathway may mature earlier, it may have a shorter developmental window of plasticity than the ventral pathway and, hence, be less malleable after perturbation.
... Consistent with the functional importance of facial recognition, there are neurological structures devoted specifically to face recognition. Damage to them results in prosopagnosia (e.g., Farah, Rabinowitz, Quinn, & Liu, 2000). All of this suggests a particular readiness to organize person information around facial representations of others. ...
A false recognition paradigm showed that spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) are bound to the person performing a trait-implying behavior. In 6 experiments, participants memorized faces and behavioral sentences. When faces were paired with implied traits in a recognition test, participants falsely recognized these traits more often than unrelated traits paired with the same faces or the same traits paired with familiar faces. The effect was obtained for a large set of behaviors (120), each presented for 5 s, and for behaviors that participants did not subsequently recognize or recall. Antonyms of the implied traits were falsely recognized less often than unrelated traits, suggesting that STIs have extended implications. Explicit person-trait judgments predicted both false recognition and response times for implied traits.
... In fact, studies find mixed evidence of functional reorganization across the literature. For instance, many studies find no evidence that ventral functions, such as word and face recognition, recover following damage in childhood (Farah, Rabinowitz, Quinn, & Liu, 2000;Hadjikhani & de Gelder, 2002), even when the damage occurred on day 1 of life. By contrast, other studies find successful reorganization and normal recognition performance (Cohen et al., 2004;Mancini, de Schonen, Deruelle, & Massoulier, 1994), even when the disruptions occurred late in childhood (for review, see Liu & Behrmann, 2017;Vargha-Khadem & Polkey, 1992). ...
Hemispherectomy is a surgical procedure in which an entire hemisphere of a patient's brain is resected or functionally disconnected to manage seizures in individuals with drug-resistant epilepsy. Despite the extensive loss of input from both ventral and dorsal visual pathways of one hemisphere, pediatric patients who have undergone hemispherectomy show a remarkably high degree of perceptual function across many domains. In the current study, we sought to understand the extent to which functions of the ventral and dorsal visual pathways reorganize to the contralateral hemisphere following childhood hemispherectomy. To this end, we collected fMRI data from an equal number of left and right hemispherectomy patients who completed tasks that typically elicit lateralized responses from the ventral or the dorsal pathway, namely, word (left ventral), face (right ventral), tool (left dorsal), and global form (right dorsal) perception. Overall, there was greater evidence of functional reorganization in the ventral pathway than in the dorsal pathway. Importantly, because ventral and dorsal reorganization was tested in the very same patients, these results cannot be explained by idiosyncratic factors such as disease etiology, age at the time of surgery, or age at testing. These findings suggest that because the dorsal pathway may mature earlier, it may have a shorter developmental window of plasticity than the ventral pathway and, hence, be less malleable.
... We used face stimuli in this study. Faces enjoy an advantage relative to other objects and stimuli in visual processing due to either an innate neurological mechanism or quickly learned expertise [89,90]. Lettvin et al. [91] proposed the term "grandmother cell" to describe individual neurons that respond best to hypercomplex stimuli, such as faces [92]. ...
Little is known empirically about connectivity and communication between the two hemispheres of the brain in the first year of life, and what theoretical opinion exists appears to be at variance with the meager extant anatomical evidence. To shed initial light on the question of interhemispheric connectivity and communication, this study investigated brain correlates of interhemispheric transmission of information in young human infants. We analyzed EEG data from 12 4-month-olds undergoing a face-related oddball ERP protocol. The activity in the contralateral hemisphere differed between odd-same and odd-difference trials, with the odd-different response being weaker than the response during odd-same trials. The infants’ contralateral hemisphere “recognized” the odd familiar stimulus and “discriminated” the odd-different one. These findings demonstrate connectivity and communication between the two hemispheres of the brain in the first year of life and lead to a better understanding of the functional integrity of the developing human infant brain.
... Faces are highly salient and evolutionarily important visual stimuli from which information required for optimal social interactions are drawn (Bailly et al., 2010). Hence, impairments in face and facial emotion processing capacity as reported in ASD (Dawson et al., 2005;Lozier et al., 2014;Weigelt et al., 2012) and in the BAP (Becker et al., 2021;Poljac et al., 2013;Tardif et al., 2007) are thought to contribute to the development of social difficulties (Schultz, 2005) and impairments in social interactions (Farah et al., 2000;Hoehl & Striano, 2013). Such arguments are supported by evidence demonstrating weak or reduced activation of neural regions associated with face processing in brain imaging of adults with autism compared to neurotypical individuals (Dalton et al., 2005;McPartland et al., 2004;Pierce et al., 2001;Sabatino et al., 2013) One demonstration of the special nature of faces in the general population is referred to as the face inversion effect, in which preferable processing of upright compared with inverted faces is evidenced (Farah et al., 1995). ...
Introduction
Atypical visual and social attention has often been associated with clinically diagnosed autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and with the broader autism phenotype. Atypical social attention is of particular research interest given the importance of facial expressions for social communication, with faces tending to attract and hold attention in neurotypical individuals. In autism, this is not necessarily so, where there is debate about the temporal differences in the ability to disengage attention from a face.
Method
Thus, we have used eye-tracking to record saccadic latencies as a measure of time to disengage attention from a central task-irrelevant face before orienting to a newly presented peripheral nonsocial target during a gap-overlap task. Neurotypical participants with higher or lower autism-like traits (AT) completed the task that included central stimuli with varied expressions of facial emotion as well as an inverted face.
Results
High AT participants demonstrated faster saccadic responses to detect the nonsocial target than low AT participants when disengaging attention from a face. Furthermore, faster saccadic responses were recorded when comparing disengagement from upright to inverted faces in low AT but not in high AT participants.
Conclusions
Together, these results extend findings of atypical social attention disengagement in autism and highlight how differences in attention to faces in the broader autism phenotype can lead to apparently superior task performance under certain conditions. Specifically, autism traits were linked to faster attention orienting to a nonsocial target due to the reduced attentional hold of the task irrelevant face stimuli. The absence of an inversion effect in high AT participants also reinforces the suggestion that they process upright or inverted faces similarly, unlike low AT participants for whom inverted faces are thought to be less socially engaging, thus allowing faster disengagement.
... An alternative hypothesis is that children possess adult-like susceptibility to the memorability effect early on, and we would expect young children to have similar memory patterns to adults. Previous research has found that infants are born with capabilities to process faces (Farah et al., 2000;Tzourio-Mazoyer et al., 2002), scenes (Kamps et al., 2020), and edges (Kessen et al., 1972). These commonalities in visual processing between newborns and adults indicate early sensitivity to certain visual categories and properties, occurring in late visual areas in the brain (i.e., the inferotemporal cortex). ...
Adults have been shown to consistently remember and forget certain images despite large individual differences, suggesting a population-wide sensitivity to an image’s intrinsic memorability —a measure of how successfully an image is remembered. While a decade of research has focused on image memorability among adults, the developmental trajectory of these consistencies in memory is understudied. Here, we investigate by what age children gain adultlike sensitivity to the image memorability effect. We utilized data from Saragosa-Harris et al. (2021), where 137 children aged between 3 and 5 years old encoded animal-scene image pairs and then after a 5-minute, 24-hour, or 1-week delay performed a cued recognition task for each scene target given its animal cue. We tested adults’ memory of the same scene images using ResMem (Needell & Bainbridge, 2022), a pre-trained deep neural network that predicts adult image memorability scores, and using an online behavioral continuous recognition task (N = 116). Results showed that ResMem predictions, as a proxy of adults’ memory, predicted scene memory of children by the age of 4 and were the most predictive of children’s memory across ages after a long, 1-week delay. Children at age 3 show non-adult-like consistent memory patterns, implying that the non-adult-like memory patterns were not due to poor memory performance. Instead, 3-year-olds may have consistently used certain visual memory strategies that become less optimal as they age. Our results suggest that adult-like sensitivity to image memorability emerges by the age of 4 through experience.
Public Significance Statement
This study strongly suggests that children older than 4 years old tend to remember and forget the same images as adults. We recommend teachers and caregivers to utilize the ResMem DNN to select memorable images to be used in educational settings.
... Processing facial cues is an ubiquitous operation in our lives and involves a larger portion of our brain than the processing of other objects [RHD12]. Behavioral, neuroimaging, and other brain function studies [FRQL00,APM00,Kan10] have demonstrated that our brain involved specific and dedicated strategies to grasp faces information. These findings promote the hypothesis that our brain preferentially focuses on faces. ...
Facial animation consists of breathing life into computer graphic characters. The major challenge of facial animation is to fool the human's eyes, very acute at recognizing natural motion. The emergence and increasing availability of motion capture technologies have opened a new era, where realistic animation generation is more deterministic and repeatable. The theoretical promise of MoCap is the ability to capture and retarget human performances completely. In reality, even professional motion capture setups often fall short of a perfect animation. Animation editing is therefore unavoidable and frequently the bottleneck of modern performance-based animation pipelines, requiring a considerable amount of time and special skills. We propose to improve the facial animation signal editing process by leveraging the recent deep learning techniques. These methods enable producing realistic motion sequences, endowed with all the specificities included in the real animation used for the training. We adopt this technology to enhance the cleaning facial animation editing process, providing a solution preserving and even restoring the facial motion dynamics. We also explore new possibilities to synthesize facial animations from alternative high-level control inputs, more semantic and intuitive than the current standard animation parameters. Pushing forward the motion editing toward user controllability, we provide a robust and interactive regressive method to modify a facial animation efficiently from temporally dense parameters. To bypass the limitations of regression algorithms, we propose a generative framework suitable for unsupervised and supervised motion editing.
... The tissue sections were dewaxed in xylene, rehydrated, and stained with haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) dyes. The stained tissues were slipped with Distyrene Plasticizer Xylene (DPX), dried, and tested microscopically for granulomas [65]. ...
Schistosomiasis continues to affect the health and quality of life of millions of people around the world. Schistosomiasis has been ranked the second disease after malaria in terms of importance as a targeted tropical disease. Praziquantel (PZQ) is the only drug approved by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the treatment of schistosomiasis. Being the only drug, parasite resistance to this drug has developed. Therefore, the search for new alternatives has been the goal of many researchers. In this study, the effects of aqueous extracts of Zingiber officinale, Piper nigrum, and Coriandrum sativum on Schistosoma mansoni infected golden hamsters (Egyptian strain) were evaluated in vitro and in vivo at different doses of 500, 250, 125, 62.5, and 31.25 μg/ml. In vitro, adult worms of S. mansoni were tested in RPMI-1640 medium for 48 hrs. The results showed that the concentrations 500, 250, and 125 μg/ml of Zingiber officinale and Piper nigrum caused dead of 100% of adult worms within 6 and 12 hrs of incubation, respectively. Although, aqueous extract of Coriandrum sativum at concentrations 500, 250, and 125 μg/ml resulted dead of 100% parasites after 12 to 24 hrs of incubation. In conclusion, Zingiber officinale and Piper nigrum showed efficacy against schistosomiasis in both in vitro and biological experiments of Egyptian schistosome strain, while Coriandrum sativum gave less effective results than the previous ones. Therefore, Zingiber officinale and Piper nigrum may become an innovative treatment for schistosomiasis.
... Small portions of the organs were obtained and washed overnight under running water to remove excess formalin. Slices were made to be examined microscopically for granulomas according to Baker [30] and Farah [31]. ...
World Health Organization (WHO) has approved only one treatment for schistosomiasis, praziquantel (PZQ), but some poor efficacy was noticed in patients during the early stage of infection. Therefore, researchers have intensified their efforts to research new alternative medicines to treat schistosomiasis. In the present study, in vitro as well as in vivo studies have been accomplished to evaluate the effect of Origanum majorana, Ziziphus spina-christi, and Salvia fruticosa extracts in a different concentration 500, 250, 125, 62.5, and 31.25 μg/ml on golden hamster infected by Egyptian strains of schistosome (Schistosoma haematobium). In vitro, the adult worms and schistosomula of S. haematobium were investigated in RPMI-1640 medium for 48 hrs. The results showed that the concentration 500, 250, and 125 μg/ml of Origanum majorana, and Ziziphus spina-christi caused dead of 100% of Egyptian Schistosoma strains of adult worm and schistosomula of S. haematobium within 6 to 12 hrs of incubation. On the other hand, the extract of Salvia fruticosa at concentrations 500, 250, and 125 μg/ml showed death 100% parasites after 12 to 24 hrs of incubation. Inclusion, Origanum majorana, and Ziziphus spina-christi showed effectiveness against Egyptian Schistosoma strains (S. haematobium), a slight decrease in Salvia fruticosa was observed. Therefore, these medical plant extracts may be used as a safe and effective treatment for schistosomiasis.
... The stained tissues were slipped with Distyrene plasticizer xylene (DPX), dried and tested microscopically for granulomas. 28 The morphology of CS-5%CuO Figure 1 signifies the SEM micrograph and TEM image of the calcium silicate incorporating 5% CuO. They demonstrated backed fine rounded grains in the nanoscale size ˂50 nm which confirm the nanosize. ...
Abstract
Purpose: Praziquantel (PZQ) is a well-known drug accredited by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the treatment of schistosomiasis. It shows poor efficiency in patients during the earliest infection phases. Therefore, the search for new alternative drugs was the intention of many researchers.
The results declare that CS-5% CuO exhibited excellent anti-schistosomal activities on
both in vitro and in vivo experiments for both Egyptians Schistosoma strains. The most potential effect of the CS-5% CuO was exhibited after 6 h by 10 μg∕mL with significant activity of (P value = 0.001).
... One factor concerns the presence of other visual deficits; for example, elementary visual deficits such as esotropia, amblyopia, reduced acuity, and visual field abnormalities. These accompanying visual deficits likely result in deprivation of normal experience and input, which may hamper a normal outcome, as in the case of Adam who never recovered the ability to recognize faces (Farah et al., 2000). A similar persistent impairment in face perception is present even in children with transient cataracts who, even without a cortical lesion, have long-lasting deficits in face and holistic processing (Le Grand et al., 2001Grand et al., , 2003Grand et al., , 2004Lewis and Maurer, 2005). ...
The consequences of cortical resection, a treatment for humans with pharmaco-resistant epilepsy, provide a unique opportunity to advance our understanding of the nature and extent of cortical (re)organization. Despite the importance of visual processing in daily life, the neural and perceptual sequellae of occipitotemporal resections remain largely unexplored. Using psychophysical and fMRI investigations, we compared the neural and visuoperceptual profiles of 10 children or adolescents following unilateral cortical resections and their age- and gender-matched controls. Dramatically, with the exception of two individuals, both of whom had relatively greater cortical alterations, all patients showed normal perceptual performance on tasks of intermediate- and high-level vision, including face and object recognition. Consistently, again with the exception of the same two individuals, both univariate and multivariate fMRI analyses revealed normal selectivity and representational structure of category-selective regions. Furthermore, the spatial organization of category-selective regions obeyed the typical medial-to-lateral topographic organization albeit unilaterally in the structurally preserved hemisphere rather than bilaterally. These findings offer novel insights into the malleability of cortex in the pediatric population and suggest that, although experience may be necessary for the emergence of neural category-selectivity, this emergence is not necessarily contingent on the integrity of particular cortical structures.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT One approach to reduce seizure activity in patients with pharmaco-resistant epilepsy involves the resection of the epileptogenic focus. The impact of these resections on the perceptual behaviors and organization of visual cortex remain largely unexplored. Here, we characterized the visuoperceptual and neural profiles of ventral visual cortex in a relatively large sample of post-resection pediatric patients. Two major findings emerged. First, most patients exhibited preserved visuoperceptual performance across a wide-range of visual behaviors. Second, normal topography, magnitude, and representational structure of category-selective organization were uncovered in the spared hemisphere. These comprehensive imaging and behavioral investigations uncovered novel evidence concerning the neural representations and visual functions in children who have undergone cortical resection, and have implications for cortical plasticity more generally.
... This would also be in line with the central debate around the fusiform face area, of which some say that it is involved in processing visual stimuli in domains of perceptual expertise (Gauthier, Tarr, & Anderson, 1999; but see Johnson, 2005). However, others state that this region is involved in processing domainspecific computational properties for selective activation for faces (Farah, Rabinowitz, Quinn, & Liu, 2000). According to Johnson (2005), there may also be an intermediate course, such that parts of the fusiform cortex become specialized for processing faces through cortical projections of the subcortical route, which initially causes the orientation towards faces. ...
This dissertation highlights various aspects of basic social attention by choosing versatile approaches to disentangle the precise mechanisms underlying the preference to focus on other human beings. The progressive examination of different social processes contrasted with aspects of previously adopted principles of general attention. Recent research investigating eye movements during free exploration revealed a clear and robust social bias, especially for the faces of depicted human beings in a naturalistic scene. However, free viewing implies a combination of mechanisms, namely automatic attention (bottom-up), goal-driven allocation (top-down), or contextual cues and inquires consideration of overt (open exploration using the eyes) as well as covert orienting (peripheral attention without eye movement). Within the scope of this dissertation, all of these aspects have been disentangled in three studies to provide a thorough investigation of different influences on social attention mechanisms. In the first study (section 2.1), we implemented top-down manipulations targeting non-social features in a social scene to test competing resources. Interestingly, attention towards social aspects prevailed, even though this was detrimental to completing the requirements. Furthermore, the tendency of this bias was evident for overall fixation patterns, as well as fixations occurring directly after stimulus onset, suggesting sustained as well as early preferential processing of social features. Although the introduction of tasks generally changes gaze patterns, our results imply only subtle variance when stimuli are social. Concluding, this experiment indicates that attention towards social aspects remains preferential even in light of top-down demands. The second study (section 2.2) comprised of two separate experiments, one in which we investigated reflexive covert attention and another in which we tested reflexive as well as sustained overt attention for images in which a human being was unilaterally located on either the left or right half of the scene. The first experiment consisted of a modified dot-probe paradigm, in which peripheral probes were presented either congruently on the side of the social aspect, or incongruently on the non-social side. This was based on the assumption that social features would act similar to cues in traditional spatial cueing paradigms, thereby facilitating reaction times for probes presented on the social half as opposed to the non-social half. Indeed, results reflected such congruency effect. The second experiment investigated these reflexive mechanisms by monitoring eye movements and specifying the location of saccades and fixations for short as well as long presentation times. Again, we found the majority of initial saccades to be congruently directed to the social side of the stimulus. Furthermore, we replicated findings for sustained attention processes with highest fixation densities for the head region of the displayed human being. The third study (section 2.3), tackled the other mechanism proposed in the attention dichotomy, the bottom-up influence. Specifically, we reduced the available contextual information of a scene by using a gaze-contingent display, in which only the currently fixated regions would be visible to the viewer, while the remaining image would remain masked. Thereby, participants had to voluntarily change their gaze in order to explore the stimulus. First, results revealed a replication of a social bias in free-viewing displays. Second, the preference to select social features was also evident in gaze-contingent displays. Third, we find higher recurrent gaze patterns for social images compared to non-social ones for both viewing modalities. Taken together, these findings imply a top-down driven preference for social features largely independent of contextual information. Importantly, for all experiments, we took saliency predictions of different computational algorithms into consideration to ensure that the observed social bias was not a result of high physical saliency within these areas. For our second experiment, we even reduced the stimulus set to those images, which yielded lower mean and peak saliency for the side of the stimulus containing the social information, while considering algorithms based on low-level features, as well as pre-trained high-level features incorporated in deep learning algorithms. Our experiments offer new insights into single attentional mechanisms with regard to static social naturalistic scenes and enable a further understanding of basic social processing, contrasting from that of non-social attention. The replicability and consistency of our findings across experiments speaks for a robust effect, attributing social attention an exceptional role within the general attention construct, not only behaviorally, but potentially also on a neuronal level and further allowing implications for clinical populations with impaired social functioning.
... A single case of developmental prosopagnosia suggested that face recognition is domain specific (and not a general visuospatial competence), in that the deficit occurred only for upright facial stimuli (Duchaine, Yovel, Butterworth, & Nakayama, 2006). More evidence that neural tissue is innately dedicated to face recognition arose from studies of a child with a severe, acquired face recognition deficit without object perception problems, who sustained brain damage shortly after birth (Farah, Rabinowitz, Quinn, & Liu, 2000). The common observation that inverted faces elicit better discrimination performance in some persons with prosagnosia has been brought forth to support the notion of modularity in that ability (Farah, Wilson, Drain, & Tanaka, 1995). ...
This chapter recounts the history of early studies of familiar voice recognition
... In other words, a visual expertise account of prosopagnosia is not an alternative to the domain-specificity account of prosopagnosia, it merely proposes a reason why a face-specific deficit can occur: because visual expertise is domain-specific, that is, restricted to the category of faces in typical human adults. This level of expertise in IFR shared by typical human adults could be due to biological constraints (e.g., Farah, Rabinowitz, Quinn, & Liu, 2000;Wilmer et al., 2010;Morton & Johnson, 1991) or opportunities (e.g., the large amount of facial interindividual phenotypic variability in the human species, Sheehan & Nachman, 2014), as well as to our overwhelming experience with faces during development (e.g., Carey, 1992;Sugden, Mohamed-Ali, & Moulson, 2014) and social requirements to individuate numerous conspecifics in the human species. ...
The sudden inability to recognize individual faces following brain damage was first reported in a scientific journal 150 years ago and termed ‘prosopagnosia’ 70 years ago. While the term originally identified a face‐selective neurological condition, it is now obscured by a sequence of imprecisions. First, prosopagnosia is routinely used to define symptoms of individual face recognition (IFR) difficulties in the context of visual object agnosia or other neurological conditions, or even in the normal population. Second, this over‐expansive definition has lent support to a long‐standing within‐category recognition account of prosopagnosia, that is, that the impairment of IFR reflects a general impairment in recognizing within‐category objects. However, stringent experimental studies of classical cases of prosopagnosia following brain damage show that their core impairment is not in recognizing physically similar exemplars within non‐face object categories. Instead, the impairment presents specifically for recognizing exemplars of the category of faces. Moreover, compared to typical observers, the impairment appears even more severe for recognizing individual faces against physically dissimilar than similar distractors. Here, I argue that we need to limit accordingly our definition of prosopagnosia to a clinical (i.e., neurological) condition in which there is no basic‐level object recognition impairment. Other criteria for prosopagnosia are proposed, with the hope that this conservative definition enables the study of human IFR processes in isolation, and supports progress in understanding the nature of these processes.
... This in turn implies that the distinction between living and nonliving things, and the anatomical localization of knowledge of living things, are specified in the human genome. (Farah and Rabinowitz 2003, p. 408) In a related study, Farah et al. (2000) examined a different specific representational deficit in the same subject, namely, Adam's difficulty with faces. At the age of sixteen, Adam had the classic profile of prosopagnosia-lesions in occipitotemporal cortex (bilaterally), with a severe impairment in the ability to recognize faces relative to good, though not perfect, object recognition abilities. ...
New essays by leading philosophers and cognitive scientists that present recent findings and theoretical developments in the study of concepts.
The study of concepts has advanced dramatically in recent years, with exciting new findings and theoretical developments. Core concepts have been investigated in greater depth and new lines of inquiry have blossomed, with researchers from an ever broader range of disciplines making important contributions. In this volume, leading philosophers and cognitive scientists offer original essays that present the state-of-the-art in the study of concepts. These essays, all commissioned for this book, do not merely present the usual surveys and overviews; rather, they offer the latest work on concepts by a diverse group of theorists as well as discussions of the ideas that should guide research over the next decade. The book is an essential companion volume to the earlier Concepts: Core Readings, the definitive source for classic texts on the nature of concepts.
The essays cover concepts as they relate to animal cognition, the brain, evolution, perception, and language, concepts across cultures, concept acquisition and conceptual change, concepts and normativity, concepts in context, and conceptual individuation. The contributors include such prominent scholars as Susan Carey, Nicola Clayton, Jerry Fodor, Douglas Medin, Joshua Tenenbaum, and Anna Wierzbicka.
ContributorsAurore Avarguès-Weber, Eef Ameel, Megan Bang, H. Clark Barrett, Pascal Boyer, Elisabeth Camp, Susan Carey, Daniel Casasanto, Nicola S. Clayton, Dorothy L. Cheney, Vyvyan Evans, Jerry A. Fodor, Silvia Gennari, Tobias Gerstenberg, Martin Giurfa, Noah D. Goodman, J. Kiley Hamlin, James A. Hampton, Mutsumi Imai, Charles W. Kalish, Frank Keil, Jonathan Kominsky, Stephen Laurence, Gary Lupyan, Edouard Machery, Bradford Z. Mahon, Asifa Majid, Barbara C. Malt, Eric Margolis, Douglas Medin, Nancy J. Nersessian, bethany ojalehto, Anna Papafragou, Joshua M. Plotnik, Noburo Saji, Robert M. Seyfarth, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Sandra Waxman, Daniel A. Weiskopf, Anna Wierzbicka
... Thus, it is not yet clear whether the most comfortable and effective human-robot communication would come from a robot that looks mechanical or human. However, we may infer a humanlike appearance is important from the fact that human beings have developed neural centers specialized for the detection and interpretation of hands and faces (Grill-Spector et al., 2004;Farah et al., 2000;Carmel & Bentin, 2002). A robot that closely resembles humans in both looks and behavior may prove to be the ultimate communication device insofar as it can interact with humans the most naturally. ...
One of the main aims of humanoid robotics is to develop robots that are capable of interacting naturally with people. However, to understand the essence of human interaction, it is crucial to investigate the contribution of behavior and appearance. Our group’s research explores these relationships by developing androids that closely resemble human beings in both aspects. If humanlike appearance causes us to evaluate an android’s behavior from a human standard, we are more likely to be cognizant of deviations from human norms. Therefore, the android’s motions must closely match human performance to avoid looking strange, including such autonomic responses as the shoulder movements involved in breathing. This paper proposes a method to implement motions that look human by mapping their three-dimensional appearance from a human performer to the android and then evaluating the verisimilitude of the visible motions using a motion capture system. Previous research has focused on copying and moving joint angles from a person to a robot. Our approach has several advantages: (1) in an android robot with many degrees of freedom and kinematics that differ from that of a human being, it is difficult to calculate which joint angles would make the robot’s posture appear similar to the human performer; and (2) the motion that we perceive is at the robot’s surface, not necessarily at its joints, which are often hidden from view.
... By the age of 6 months, typically developing infants exhibit specific brain responses, which have been documented by event related potentials (ERPs), to different facial expressions such as familiar versus unfamiliar faces or fearful versus unfearful or neutral faces. Such early face processing abilities are vital for interpretation of emotional expressions and sharing attention and interests with others [12][13][14][15][16]. ...
Highlighting the neurological basis of normal face processing and its abnormalities in ASD seems crucial because of its percussions on symptomatology and the management plan of autistic children. Human face processing that has been proven to be compromised in many autistic individuals is pivotal for proper social interactions. Such spontaneous perceptual task in normal children is carried out by face processing areas of the brain as fusiform gyrus, superior temporal sulcus, and amygdala. Behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies showed evidences of dysfunction of such areas in many autistics who often focus on face periphery and cannot interpret that it tells something about a person’s state of mind. Very early targeted intervention can stimulate face processing areas of the brain during the early developmental phases of social brain circuitry which in turn will help autistics to pay attention to faces and learn how to understand emotional expressions. Eventually, prevention or at least significant amelioration of both the spectrum and severity of autistic symptomatology might be possible.
... Researchers have investigated handedness [39] and other hemispheric lateralization theories related to emotional processing both for the mother [8,9,49] and infant [14,[50][51][52]. The relationship of cradling bias to the neural substrates of face processing have also been a subject of study [19,21,[53][54][55][56][57]. ...
... There is general consensus, that both injunctive and descriptive social norms are learned through socialization, or social learning (Haidt, 2003). In comparison to other animals, humans seem to be especially built for it -with brains designed to socialize thanks to mirror neurons, facial recognition, and language capacities (Farah et al., 2000;Kohler et al., 2002;Hauser et al., 2002). In order to show how social norms are "picked up" and maintained, we draw on social learning theory (Bandura, 1977). ...
A social psychological perspective toward corruption encompasses the following question: Why do some people in the same context abuse power for their private gains while others do not? This chapter identifies social norms as a crucial variable to explain corruption on all levels of analysis and psychological justification processes. First, we outline the distinction between injunctive and descriptive norms, and explain their role with regard to corrupt behavior. Second, we review the emerging experimental literature on corruption and present novel experimental data from a comparative study in order to solidify the relationship between social norms to corruption. Third, drawing on developmental psychology theories, we illustrate how social norms are acquired, maintained, and ultimately changed. The chapter concludes with our remarks on how to successfully fight corruption.
... The candidate population to evaluate such a prediction is that of individuals with congenital prosopagnosia (CP), a developmental deficit in face recognition (colloquially referred to as "face blindness"). Unlike patients with the acquired form of prosopagnosia, who have typically sustained frank brain damage, usually to the right ventral occipital region, possibly even in childhood (e.g., Farah, Rabinowitz, Quinn, & Liu, 2000), those with CP exhibit a face processing deficit in the absence of any obvious frank neurological damage. ...
A recent theoretical account posits that, during the acquisition of word recognition in childhood, the pressure to couple visual and language representations in the left hemisphere (LH) results in competition with the LH representation of faces, which consequently become largely, albeit not exclusively, lateralized to the right hemisphere (RH). We explore predictions from this hypothesis using a hemifield behavioural paradigm with words and faces as stimuli, with concurrent event-related potential (ERP) measurement, in a group of adults with developmental dyslexia (DD) or with congenital prosopagnosia (CP) and matched control participants. Behaviourally, the DD group exhibited clear deficits in both word and face processing relative to controls, while the CP group showed a specific deficit in face processing only. This pattern was mirrored in the ERP data too. The DD group evinced neither the normal ERP pattern of RH dominance for faces nor the LH dominance for words. In contrast, the CP group showed the typical ERP superiority for words in the LH but did not show the typical RH superiority for faces. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the typical hemispheric organization for words can develop in the absence of typical hemispheric organization for faces but not vice versa, supporting the account of interactive perceptual development.
... With the establishment of term Autism, the emotional insufficiency highlighted as a major social deficit in Autism with specific disorders in emotional reactions [3][4][5]. Typically Developed (TD) children had started learning emotions of faces from the very early age of life [6]. Difficulties regarding facial emotion analysis of ASD's could recognize better by applying rapidly progressive research. ...
The aim of our study is to investigate the relation between the facial emotions of Autistic during their face processing motor activities by using a computerized approach. This experiment is conducted to establish the difference in the total response time (in seconds) for reflected face emotional expressions during the displaying videos as stimuli in the case of TD’s and ASD’s. Python 2.7 has been utilized for programming and implementing the computerized facial emotions detection system and for video playing.
... Üstelik bu kişiler hafızalarında yüzlerin holistik biricikliğini koruyamamakta, yüzü ters ya da düz olsun fark etmeden nesne gibi algılanmakta ve onun yapısal düzeninden çok hatlarına önem vermektedirler. Farah (2000) doğumunun birinci gününde beyin hasarı yaşayan bir erkek bebek bildirmiştir. Bu bebek oksibitotemporal beyin kabuğu hasarına sahip bir bebektir ve sonraki yaşlarda yüz tanıma defekti göstermiştir. ...
... Studies have shown that infants as young as 9 minutes old will turn their heads and eyes significantly more to follow a face-like stimulus than to a scrambled image of a face (Goren et al., 1975), suggesting an innate preference for face-like images (Farah et al., 2000;Slater and Quinn, 2001). Faces and face-like images are important and complex stimuli for infants at this stage in development; very young infants routinely copy facial expressions and facial movements presented to them by those around them, even when they have no concept of what their own face looks like (Meltzoff and Decety, 2003). ...
The advances of scientific techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging have led to an enormous increase in understanding of the physical, neurological and cognitive developments in infancy. Alongside this, radical new forms of theatre, dance and music have emerged, aimed at this same age group. Many artists now work alongside child psychologists, educators and other infant specialists to design performing arts productions suited to the needs and abilities of the infant audience. This article provides a summary of the development of the five main senses in early infancy in relation to theatre-based productions for babies aged 0–18 months. An exploration into this cross-disciplinary research practice not only demonstrates how performing arts have adapted for the baby audience, but also how they can provide a platform for further research into child development.
Crime is a complex phenomenon involving many factors, among which are situational and societal factors. What counts as a crime may also vary across space and time. Often, it is the interplay of several factors that may lead to criminal behavior. Scientifically, brain function is important to consider, first of all because the brain is central to behavior as such, including criminal behavior. Second, because there is increasing evidence for the relevance of specific brain dysfunctions in some criminal behavior, particularly developmental findings related to nonadaptive behavior. Many of our behavioral tendencies are rooted in our childhood (experiences), and this, it appears, is also, at least to some extent, true for nonadaptive behavior. This chapter considers several overarching issues regarding the relationship between-and the science of-brain and crime, some from a conceptual, some from a legal, and others from a developmental perspective.
The differential sensitivity hypothesis argues that environmental sensitivity has the bivalent effect of predisposing individuals to both the risk-inducing and development-enhancing influences of early social environments. However, the hypothesis requires that this variation in environmental sensitivity be general across domains. In this study, we focused on neural sensitivity and autonomic arousal to test domain generality. Neural sensitivity can be assessed by correlating measures of perceptual sensitivity, as indexed by event-related potentials (ERP) in electrophysiology. The sensitivity of autonomic arousal can be tested via heart rate changes. Domain generality was tested by comparing associations in perceptual sensitivity across auditory and visual domains, and associations between sensitivity in sensory domains and heart rate. We contrasted ERP components in auditory (P3) and visual (P1, N290 and P4) detection-of-difference tasks for N = 68 infants longitudinally at 6 and 12 months of age. Domain generality should produce correlated individual differences in sensitivity across the two modalities, with higher levels of autonomic arousal associating with increased perceptual sensitivity. Having controlled for multiple comparisons, at 6 months of age, the difference in amplitude of the P3 component evoked in response to standard and deviant tones correlated with the difference in amplitude of the P1 N290 and P4 face-sensitive components evoked in response to fearful and neutral faces. However, this correlation was not found at 12 months of age. Similarly, autonomic arousal correlated with neural sensitivity at 6 months but not at 12 months. The results suggest bottom-up neural perceptual sensitivity is domain-general across auditory and visual domains and is related to autonomic arousal at 6 months but not at 12 months of age. We interpret the development of the association of these markers of ES within a neuroconstructivist framework and with respect to the concept of interactive specialisation. By 12 months of age, more experience of visual processing may have led to top-down endogenous attention mechanisms that process visual information in a way that no longer associates with automatic auditory perceptual sensitivity.
Faces are thought to have a privileged status for processing relative to other visual images. Humans use faces to identify people, learn language, and to communicate and understand intentions, meaning and emotions. An enduring debate within the fields of developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience is whether human face processing is specialized owing to domain-specific neural circuitry driven primarily by evolutionary mechanisms or whether it emerges from a domain-general architecture through experience. In this Perspective, we argue for an experience-based account based on associative and non-associative learning and supported by general neurobiological mechanisms. We posit that face-processing specialization emerges from activity-dependent, self-organizing processes where neuronal connectivity is shaped by the environment and constrained by intrinsic yet malleable neural architecture. This ‘domain-relevant’ framework for face processing reflects a dynamic interaction between the developing brain and the environmental input. Whether human face-processing specialization arrives innately at birth or arises through experience across development is an enduring debate. In this Perspective, Scott and Arcaro argue for an experience-based account whereby face-processing specialization emerges from associative and non-associative learning constrained by intrinsic neurobiological mechanisms.
Following traumatic brain injury in adulthood, Pierrette Sapey (PS) became suddenly unable to recognize the identity of people from their faces. Thanks to her remarkable recovery of general brain function, liveliness, and willingness to be tested, PS's case of prosopagnosia has been extensively studied for more than 20 years. This investigation includes hundreds of hours of behavioral data collection that provide information about the nature of human face identity recognition (FIR). Here a theory-driven extensive review of behavioral and eye movement recording studies performed with PS is presented (part I). The specificity of PS's recognition disorder to the category of faces, i.e., with preserved visual object (identity) recognition, is emphasized, arguing that isolating this impairment is necessary to define prosopagnosia, offering a unique window to understand the nature of human FIR. Studies performed with both unfamiliar and experimentally or naturally familiar faces show that PS, while being able to perceive both detailed diagnostic facial parts and a coarse global facial shape, can no longer build a relatively fine-grained holistic visual representation of a face, preventing its efficient individuation. Her mandatory part-by-part analytic behavior during FIR causes increased difficulties at extracting diagnostic cues from the crowded eye region of the face, but also from relative distances between facial parts and from 3D shape more than from surface cues. PS's impairment is interpreted here for the first time in terms of defective (access to) cortical memories of faces following brain damage, causing her impaired holistic perception of face individuality. Implications for revising standard neurofunctional models of human face recognition and evaluation of this function in neurotypical individuals are derived.
What role does experience play in the development of face recognition? A growing body of evidence indicates that newborn brains need slowly changing visual experiences to develop accurate visual recognition abilities. All of the work supporting this “slowness constraint” on visual development comes from studies testing basic‐level object recognition. Here, we present the results of controlled‐rearing experiments that provide evidence for a slowness constraint on the development of face recognition, a prototypical subordinate‐level object recognition task. We found that (1) newborn chicks can rapidly develop view‐invariant face recognition and (2) the development of this ability relies on experience with slowly moving faces. When chicks were reared with quickly moving faces, they built distorted face representations that largely lacked invariance to viewpoint changes, effectively “breaking” their face recognition abilities. These results provide causal evidence that slowly changing visual experiences play a critical role in the development of face recognition, akin to basic‐level object recognition. Thus, face recognition is not a hardwired property of vision but is learned rapidly as the visual system adapts to the temporal structure of the animal's visual environment.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to propose and develop a live interaction-based video player system named LIV4Smile for the improvement of the social smile in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Design/methodology/approach
The proposed LIV4Smile intervention was a video player that operated by detecting smile using a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based algorithm. To maintain a live interaction, a CNN-based smile detector was configured and used in this system. The statistical test was also conducted to validate the performance of the system.
Findings
The significant improvement was observed in smile responses of individuals with ASD with the utilization of the proposed LIV4Smile system in a real-time environment.
Research limitations/implications
A small sample size and clinical utilizing for validation and initial training of ASD individuals for LIV4Smile could be considered under implications.
Originality/value
The main aim of this study was to address the inclusive practices for children with autism. The proposed CNN algorithm-based LIV4Smile intervention resulted in high accuracy in facial smile detection.
A fejlődési diszlexia újabb vizsgálatai az olvasási zavar mellett gyakran mutatnak ki teljesítménycsökkenést egyrészt a végrehajtó funkciókban (pl. munkamemória-feladatokban), másrészt vizuális tesztekben. Utóbbiak a vizuális feldolgozás ventrális útvonalának féltekei lateralizációt mutató, magasabbrendű, komplex információfeldolgozási zavarára utalnak, aminek az olvasási nehézség vélhetően csak a legszembetűnőbb megjelenési formája. Egy 2011-es metaanalízis alapján a bal fusiform arcfelismerő terület hipoaktivitása egyértelmű diszlexiában, a jobb oldali homológ terület – mely alapvető fontosságú az arcfelismerésben – érintettségével kapcsolatos vizsgálatok eredménye azonban vegyes. Ugyanígy, az arcfelismerés neurális modelljeiben a bal fusiform gyrusban található szóforma-felismerő terület szerepe tisztázatlan. Az összefoglalóban áttekintjük azokat az eredményeket, amelyek összefüggést mutatnak az arcfelismerés és az olvasás funkcionális agyi hálózatrendszere között, és bemutatjuk a fejlődési diszlexiában megjelenő vizuális deficitet.
Experience plays a fundamental role in the development of visual function. Exposure to different types of faces is an important factor believed to shape face perception ability. Contents of daily exposure to faces, i.e., the face-diet, of infants have been documented in previous studies. While face perception involves a protracted development and continues to be malleable well into adulthood, an empirical study of the adult face-diet has been lacking. We collected first-person perspective footage from 30 adults during the course of their daily activities. We found that adults' exposure to faces is longer and more diverse compared to that of infants. Frequency of exposure were highest for familiar (75%), own-race (81%), and three-quarter pose (44%) faces. Faces in the adult face-diet were relatively large (median 6 degrees) suggesting fairly close viewing distances. Face sizes were significantly larger for familiar (median 7.1°) compared to unfamiliar (median 4.9°) faces, reflecting the closer viewing distances that characterize social interaction. These results are consistent with the view that face recognition processes are tuned to the ecologically relevant values of face attributes that are encountered most frequently in the real-life context to optimize face perception abilities.
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the face processing responses of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using skin conductance response (SCR) patterns and to compare it with typically developed (TD) children. Design/methodology/approach: Two experiments have been designed to analyze the effect of face processing. In the first experiment, learned non-face (objects) vs unknown face stimuli have been shown and in the second experiment, familiar vs unfamiliar face stimuli have been shown to ten ASD and ten TD children and SCR patterns have been recorded, analyzed and compared for both the groups. Findings: It has been observed that children with ASD were able to differentiate faces out of learned non-face stimuli and their SCR patterns were similar as TD children in the first experiment. In the second experiment, children with ASD were unable to recognize familiar faces from unfamiliar faces but TD children could easily discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar faces as their SCR patterns were different from children with ASD. Research limitations/implications: The present study advocates that impairment in face identification exists in children with ASD. Hence, it can be concluded that in children with ASD face processing is present but they do not recognize familiar faces or it can be said that face familiarization effect is absent in children with ASD. Originality/value: There are very few findings that used SCR signal as main analysis parameter for face processing in children with ASD, in most of the studies; Electroencephalography signal has been used as analysis parameter. Moreover, familiar and unfamiliar face processing with multiple stimuli used in present work adds novelty to the literature.
Developmental Psychopathology is a four-volume compendium of the most complete and current research on every aspect of the field. Volume Two: Developmental Neuroscience focuses on the biological basis of psychopathology at each life stage, from nutritional deficiencies to genetics to functional brain development to evolutionary perspectives and more. Now in its third edition, this comprehensive reference has been fully updated to better reflect the current state of the field, and detail the newest findings made possible by advances in technology and neuroscience. Contributions from expert researchers and clinicians provide insight into brain development, molecular genetics methods, neurogenics approaches to pathway mapping, structural neuroimaging, and much more, including targeted discussions of specific disorders.
Advances in developmental psychopathology have burgeoned since the 2006 publication of the second edition, and keeping up on the latest findings in multiple avenues of investigation can be burdensome to the busy professional. This series solves the problem by collecting the information into one place, with a logical organization designed for easy reference.
Face processing has received much attention in psychological research literature. A variety of paradigms have been developed, investigating the effects of familiarity, inversion and visual field position on face processing. However, the effects of horizontal orientation manipulations appear to have been relatively neglected. The present study examined the effects of horizontal orientation manipulations on face recognition, and the interactions of such manipulations with the effects of familiarity, inversion and visual field position. Participants completed a computer-based face recognition test in which images of self, friend and stranger faces were presented. Participants were asked to identify the presented face by pressing the relevant key on a button box. Face stimuli were presented in true and mirrorreversed horizontal orientations, upright and inverted vertical orientations, and in the left visual field, right visual field, or bilaterally in both visual fields. Participants’ recognition speeds and accuracy scores were recorded and analysed. Results revealed that horizontal orientation did not affect recognition speed or accuracy for self, friend or stranger faces, and did not interact with familiarity, inversion or visual field positions effects. Potential explanations of these findings are discussed with relation to the current research literature, as are findings relating to familiarity, inversion and visual field position manipulations.
Keywords: inversion, horizontal orientation, bilateral gain, face processing
Face perception is probably the most developed visual perceptual skill in humans, most likely as a result of its unique evolutionary and social significance. Much recent research has converged to identify a host of relevant psychological mechanisms that support face recognition. In parallel, there has been substantial progress in uncovering the neural mechanisms that mediate rapid and accurate face perception, with specific emphasis on a broadly distributed neural circuit, comprised of multiple nodes whose joint activity supports face perception. This article focuses specifically on the neural underpinnings of face recognition, and reviews recent structural and functional imaging studies that elucidate the neural basis of this ability. In addition, the article covers some of the recent investigations that characterize the emergence of the neural basis of face recognition over the course of development, and explores the relationship between these changes and increasing behavioural competence. This paper also describes studies that characterize the nature of the breakdown of face recognition in individuals who are impaired in face recognition, either as a result of brain damage acquired at some point or as a result of the failure to master face recognition over the course of development. Finally, information regarding similarities between the neural circuits for face perception in humans and in nonhuman primates is briefly covered, as is the contribution of subcortical regions to face perception. WIREs Cogn Sci 2016, 7:247–263. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1388
This article is categorized under: Psychology > Brain Function and Dysfunction
Psychology > Perception and Psychophysics
Neuroscience > Behavior
Most people recognize familiar faces rapidly, accurately and effortlessly. However, this is not true for individuals with prosopagnosia, who show a deficit in recognizing familiar people by their faces.
The domain-specificity of the mechanisms supporting face perception is debated both for early preferences observed in the newborn and later skills found in adults. However, an even more complex question is that of the relationship between newborns' face preference and adult face expertise. Here, I review the evidence addressing the question of the necessity of early constraints for the development of expertise with objects or faces. These results suggest little reason to postulate that newborn's face preferences constrain the acquisition of face recognition in adults, beyond conjectures of an evolutionary benefit. However, more work is needed to uncover other roles for an early face bias, as well as to understand how general biases constrain the visual system so that expertise in individuating similar objects tends to recruit the same neural regions across individuals.
Children's striking ability to learn new words quickly and efficiently has spurred scholars to pinpoint the mechanism at its core. An ongoing controversy has concerned whether word learning results from a domain-specific mechanism or depends on more general abilities. One prevalent view is that children utilize multiple cues when acquiring new word meanings, suggesting a host of capacities may be influential in this process. Such capacities include more general cognitive abilities of attention and memory, lexical-specific constraints, and sensitivity to the intentions of others. What cognitive capacities are fundamental to word learning? Two approaches my colleagues and I have taken to address this question are comparing children's learning of words with the learning of non-linguistic information, and investigating the impact of children's understanding of communicative intent on the acquisition of words and facts. The findings of these studies, combined with those from diverse research programs, favor the view that word learning is not the result of a specialized language mechanism. Rather, some human capacities that are in place and used for other purposes are recruited for the task of learning words. Preliminary findings from recent studies with infants further explore the capacities that underlie early word learning.
It has been consistently reported that individuals with autism spectrum disorders show a specific deficit in decoding facial expression of emotions. In this chapter we will discuss empirical evidence as well as theoretical hypotheses which addressed the processing of faces in autistic and Asperger children. Although research data are not always consistent in showing behavioral deficits in facial expressions decoding, neuroimaging evidences indicated that autistic and Asperger children do activate different neural patterns, confirming autistic individuals rely on different strategies to process information of faces. Finally, it is argued that deficits in facial expression recognition could be due to the interaction of neural, cognitive, and social factors.
Developmental Psychopathology is a four-volume compendium of the most complete and current research on every aspect of the field. Volume Two: Developmental Neuroscience focuses on the biological basis of psychopathology at each life stage, from nutritional deficiencies to genetics to functional brain development to evolutionary perspectives and more. Now in its third edition, this comprehensive reference has been fully updated to better reflect the current state of the field, and detail the newest findings made possible by advances in technology and neuroscience. Contributions from expert researchers and clinicians provide insight into brain development, molecular genetics methods, neurogenics approaches to pathway mapping, structural neuroimaging, and much more, including targeted discussions of specific disorders.
Advances in developmental psychopathology have burgeoned since the 2006 publication of the second edition, and keeping up on the latest findings in multiple avenues of investigation can be burdensome to the busy professional. This series solves the problem by collecting the information into one place, with a logical organization designed for easy reference.
Interest in examining the underlying mechanisms of young infants' face-processing abilities is increasing; hence this paper presents a review of infants' abilities to recognize and respond to faces and their conveyed emotion as social stimuli different from other types of objects. A discussion on evidence from imitation, response to still faces, patterns of visual attention and social referencing suggests that infants have the ability to understand the meaning of faces even before they reach the age of one, and that this continues to develop during childhood. At the neurobiological level, this could be attributed to early maturation of the occipitotemporal cortex, amygdala and other cortical structures, and the delayed maturation of other structures and their connections. Evidence shows that the development of expression recognition and responses in infants is influenced strongly by experience. © 2006 by Peter J. Marshall & Nathan A. Fox. All rights reserved.
Presents a standardized set of 260 pictures for use in experiments investigating differences and similarities in the processing of pictures and words. The pictures are black-and-white line drawings executed according to a set of rules that provide consistency of pictorial representation. They have been standardized on 4 variables of central relevance to memory and cognitive processing: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. The intercorrelations among the 4 measures were low, suggesting that they are indices of different attributes of the pictures. The concepts were selected to provide exemplars from several widely studied semantic categories. Sources of naming variance, and mean familiarity and complexity of the exemplars, differed significantly across the set of categories investigated. The potential significance of each of the normative variables to a number of semantic and episodic memory tasks is discussed. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
In order to study face recognition in relative isolation from visual processes that may also contribute to object recognition and reading, we investigated CK, a man with normal face recognition but with object agnosia and dyslexia caused by a closed-head injury. We administered recognition tests of up right faces, of family resemblance, of age-transformed faces, of caricatures, of cartoons, of inverted faces, and of face features, of disguised faces, of perceptually degraded faces, of fractured faces, of faces parts, and of faces whose parts were made of objects. We compared CK's performance with that of at least 12 control participants. We found that CK performed as well as controls as long as the face was upright and retained the configurational integrity among the internal facial features, the eyes, nose, and mouth. This held regardless of whether the face was disguised or degraded and whether the face was represented as a photo, a caricature, a cartoon, or a face composed of objects. In the last case, CK perceived the face but, unlike controls, was rarely aware that it was composed of objects. When the face, or just the internal features, were inverted or when the configurational gestalt was broken by fracturing the face or misaligning the top and bottom halves, CK's performance suffered far more than that of controls. We conclude that face recognition normally depends on two systems: (1) a holistic, face-specific system that is dependent on orientationspecific coding of second-order relational features (internal), which is intact in CK and (2) a part-based object-recognition system, which is damaged in CK and which contributes to face recognition when the face stimulus does not satisfy the domain-specific conditions needed to activate the face system.
Evidence from newborns leads to the conclusion that infants are born with some information about the structure of faces. This structural information, termed CONSPEC, guides the preference for facelike patterns found in newborn infants. CONSPEC is contrasted with a device termed CONLERN, which is responsible for learning about the visual characteristics of conspecifics. In the human infant, CONLERN does not influence looking behavior until 2 months of age. The distinction between these 2 independent mechanisms allows a reconciliation of the conflicting data on the development of face recognition in human infants. Finally, evidence from another species, the domestic chick, for which a similar 2-process theory has already been put forward, is discussed. The new nomenclature is applied to the chick and used as a basis for comparison with the infant.
A patient with severe, lasting prosopagnosia could not get an immediate overview of a face sufficiently specific for successful identification. He also failed completely in tasks of visual closure despite adequate performances on numerous other tests of visual perception and memory. We conclude that prosopagnosia represents a loss of visual "configural processing"--a learned skill enabling immediate identification of individual members of a class without conscious visuospatial analysis or remembering. Prosopagnosia and agnosic alexia represent two distinct defects of configural processing: Alexics cannot identify items with distinctive features that are themselves identifiable. Prosopagnosics cannot identify objects whose critical distinguishing features have no independent identities.
this paper (except the resliced images labeled "Axial" in Fig. 2). The brain images at the left show in color the voxels that produced a significantly higher MR signal intensity (based on smoothed data) during the epochs containing faces than during those containing objects (1a) and vice versa (1b) for 1 of the 12 slices scanned. These significance images (see color key at right for this and all figures in this paper) are overlaid on a T1-weighted anatomical image of the same slice. Most of the other 11 slices showed no voxels that reached significance at the p , 10
There is a tendency in the literature to treat prosopagnosia as if it were a single disorder, dependent on the disruption of a unique mechanism and associated with a stereotyped lesional picture. The search for a common interpretation has from time to time privileged different aspects of the disorder, but the failure to reach a general consensus insinuates that an analytical approach, aiming at distinguishing, rather than unifying the manifestations of prosopagnosia, may be more fruitful. After all, nobody would conceive of aphasia as a single deficit and even for visual agnosia at least two forms have been envisaged.
Prosopagnosia is a neurological syndrome in which patients cannot recognize faces. Kecently it has been shown that some prosopagnosics give evidence of "covert" recognition: they show greater autonomic responses to familiar faces than to unfamiliar ones, and respond differently to familiar faces in learning and interference tasks. Although some patients do not show covert recognition, this has usually been attributed to an "apperceptive" deficit that impairs perceptual analysis of the input. The implication is that prosopagnosia is a deficit in access to, or awareness of, memories of faces: the inducing brain injury does not destroy the memories themselves. We present a case study that challenges this view. LH suffers from prosopagnosia as the result of a closed head injury. He cannot recognize familiar faces or report that they are familiar, nor answer questions about the faces from memory, though he can (1) recognize common objects and subtly varying shapes, (2) match faces while ignoring irrelevant information such as emotional expression or angle of view, (3) recognize sex, age, and like-ability from faces, and (4) recognize people by a number of nonfacial channels. The only other categories of shapes that he has marked trouble recognizing are animals and emotional expressions, though even these impairments were not as severe as the one for faces. Three measures (sympathetic skin response, pupil dilation, and learning correct and incorrect names of faces) failed to show any signs of covert face recognition in LH, though the measures were sensitive enough to reflect autonomic reactions in LH to stimuli other than faces, and face familiarity in normal controls. Thus prosopagnosia cannot always be attributed to a mere absence of awareness (i.e., preserved information about faces whose output is disconnected from conscious cognitive processing), to an apperceptive deficit (i.e., preserved information about faces that cannot be accessed due to improperly analyzed perceptual input), or to an inability to recognize complex or subtly varying shapes (i.e., loss or degradation of shape memory in general). We conclude that it is possible for brain injury to eliminate the storage of information about familiar faces and certain related shapes.
This paper reports an investigation into an apparent category-specific disorder in a young woman whose semantic memory was impaired following a road accident. In Experiment 1, an impairment for processing specific items in tasks of naming pictures and defining words was related to a selective impairment for living things and also to the familiarity level of the items. In Experiment 2, a difference in semantic category (living or nonliving) was pitted against a difference in familiarity (high or low) in a picture-naming task. A significant effect of familiarity was found, but no effect of semantic category. It was shown that, in a widely used set of published pictures, living things were generally of lower familiarity than nonliving things. Moreover, measures of familiarity were shown to be confounded with some reported evidence in support of a selective impairment to living things. It was concluded that, at present, there is no convincing evidence to support the theory that semantic memory is organised into dissociable categories of living and nonliving things.
Studies of brain-damaged patients have revealed the existence of a selective impairment of face processing, prosopagnosia, resulting from lesions at different loci in the occipital and temporal lobes. The results of such studies have led to the identification of several cortical areas underlying the processing of faces, but it remains unclear what functional aspects of face processing are served by these areas and whether they are uniquely devoted to the processing of faces. The present study addresses these questions in a positron emission tomography (PET) study of regional cerebral blood flow in normal adults, using the 15 oxygen water bolus technique. The subjects participated in six tasks (with gratings, faces and objects), and the resulting level of cerebral activation was mapped on images of the subjects' cerebral structures obtained through magnetic resonance and was compared between tasks using the subtraction method. Compared with a fixation condition, regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) changes were found in the striate and extrastriate cortex when subjects had to decide on the orientation of sine-wave gratings. A face-gender categorization resulted in activation changes in the right extrastriate cortex, and a face-identity condition produced additional activation of the fusiform gyrus and anterior temporal cortex of both hemispheres, and of the right parahippocampal gyrus and adjacent areas. Cerebral activation during an object-recognition task occurred essentially in the left occipito-temporal cortex and did not involve the right hemisphere regions specifically activated during the face-identity task. The results provide the first empirical evidence from normal subjects regarding the crucial role of the ventro-medial region of the right hemisphere in face recognition, and they offer new information about the dissociation between face and object processing.
K.D. has been unable to recognize people's faces since sustaining cerebral injury in infancy. Investigation of this disorder carried out when K.D. was aged 8 to 11 years showed that although her basic visual abilities were impaired, they were no poorer than those of other children who recognized faces without difficulty. K.D. had learned to read, but had not regained ability to recognize people's faces; instead she relied primarily on voices as a cue to person recognition. There was no evidence of any degree of overt or covert recognition of familiar faces, and K.D. also experienced problems in visual object recognition. She could, however, classify a visual input as a face, was able to perceive and imitate facial expressions, and was able to perform face matching tasks to an extent limited by her use of a feature by feature matching strategy. It is suggested that K.D.'s impairment affected higher order perceptual abilities, and is in a number of respects comparable to the impairments found in adult prosopagnosic patients.
The relations between prosopagnosia and the ability to discriminate unfamiliar faces are reviewed and the performance of a prosopagnosic patient on a facial discrimination test as well as on other tasks requiring the processing and integration of visual information is described. The finding that this patient showed essentially normal ability to discriminate unfamiliar faces supports the contention that prosopagnosia cannot be solely explained in terms of a general visuoperceptive impairment. The present state of our understanding of the disabilities underlying both prosopagnosia and defective discrimination of unfamiliar faces is discussed.
Two new cases of prosopagnosia are described and compared with pertinent clinical material from the English language literature. The interpretation of this disorder most compatible with the clinical data appears to us to be that there is an underspecification of visuoperceptive information preventing both the formation of significant face images and the retrieval of well-known face memoranda existing within a relatively intact visual remote memory store. Failure of formation of immediate memoranda of similarly complex visual images is also commonly observed but does not seem to be a requirement for the symptom of prosopagnosia. Conceptualizing this abnormality as simply a material specific visual agnosia of images beyond the classifier level would still appear to be acceptable if less informative.
Prosopagnosics are impaired at face recognition, but unimpaired, or relatively less impaired, at common object recognition. It has been suggested that this dissociation results simply from the greater difficulty of face recognition compared to object recognition, or from the greater need to discriminate visually similar members of a single category in face recognition compared to object recognition. We tested these hypotheses using the performance of normal subjects in an 'old/new' recognition paradigm to establish the true relative difficulty of face and object recognition, and required both normal subjects and a prosopagnosic subject to discriminate both faces and visually similar exemplars of nonface object categories. In two different experiments, the prosopagnosic patient performed disproportionately poorly with faces. These results disconfirm the hypotheses described above, and imply that prosopagnosia is an impairment of a specialized form of visual recognition that is necessary for face recognition and is not necessary, or less necessary, for the recognition of common objects.
Disagreement over the neuroanatomical substrate of associative visual agnosia encompasses such basic issues as: (1) the necessity for bilateral lesions; (2) the intrahemispheric locus of damage; and (3) the roles of disconnection versus cortical damage. We examined three patients whose associative visual agnosia encompassed objects and printed words but spared faces. CAT scans revealed unilateral dominant occipitotemporal strokes. CAT scans of four previously reported cases with this same profile of associative agnosia were obtained. Dominant parahippocampal, fusiform and lingual gyri were the most extensively damaged cortical regions surveyed and were involved in all cases. Of white matter tracts surveyed, only temporal white matter including inferior longitudinal fasciculus was severely and universally involved. Splenium of the corpus callosum was frequently but not always involved. We conclude there is a form of associative visual agnosia with agnosia for objects and printed words but sparing face recognition which has a characteristic unilateral neuropathology. Damage or disconnection of dominant parahippocampal, fusiform and lingual gyri is the necessary and sufficient lesion.
The early position that prosopagnosia is predominantly associated with right hemisphere (RH) injury was challenged by the finding that in practically all cases that come to autopsy pathological data point to bilateral damage. Yet the rejection of the RH hypothesis may have been too hasty. We report three prosopagnosic patients in whom MRI and CT documented a lesion confined to the right occipito-temporal areas and PET confirmed that hypometabolism involved the RH only. A review of the literature brought out 27 cases with neuroimaging evidence that prosopagnosia was associated with RH damage plus four cases with surgical evidence. It remains, however, that the inability to recognize familiar faces is a rare disorder, not manifested by the majority of patients with right temporo-occipital injury. We submit that right-handers differ in the degree of their RH specialization in processing faces and that in only a minority of them is it so marked that it cannot be compensated for by the healthy left hemisphere.
A follow-up study of a patient, WJ with a very severe prosopagnosia is reported. After a stroke he became a farmer and acquired a flock of sheep. He learn to recognize and name many of his sheep, and his performance on tests of recognition memory and paired-associate learning for sheep was significantly better than on comparable tests using human face stimuli. It is concluded that in some instances prosopagnosia can be a face-specific disorder.
This review compares the behavioral, physiological and anatomical repercussions of lesions of primary visual cortex incurred by developing and mature humans, monkey and cats. Comparison of the data on the repercussions following lesions incurred earlier or later in life suggests that earlier, but not later, damage unmasks a latent flexibility of the brain to compensate partially for functions normally attributed to the damaged cortex. The compensations are best documented in the cat and they can be linked to system-wide repercussions that include selected pathway expansions and neuron degenerations, and functional adjustments in neuronal activity. Even though evidence from humans and monkeys is extremely limited, it is argued on the basis of known repercussions and similarity of visual system organization and developmental sequence, that broadly equivalent repercussions most likely occur in humans and monkeys following early lesions of primary visual cortex. The extant data suggest potentially useful directions for future investigations on functional anatomical aspects of visual capacities spared in human patients and monkeys following early damage of primary visual cortex. Such research is likely to have a substantial impact on increasing our understanding of the repercussions that result from damage elsewhere in the developing cerebral cortex and it is likely to contribute to our understanding of the remarkable ability of the human brain to adapt to insults.
The develop-ment of modern behavioural neurology and neuro-psychology
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