FACE RECOGNITION IMPAIRMENTS

Face recognition impairments are often found in the context of brain injury involving the right cerebral hemisphere. Recognition impairments can be dissociated from impairments affecting the processing of other types of information carried by the face, such as expression. The face recognition impairments themselves take different forms, corresponding to idealized stages or levels of recognition. These types of error can also arise as transitory phenomena in normal everyday life. From these observations, psychologists have proposed functional models that characterize the organization of the face processing system in schematic form. Such models provide useful ways of summarizing what is known. More importantly, they also allow new findings to act as tests of each model's usefulness by the extent to which they can be readily accommodated or force revision. Examples of this are briefly considered, including delusional misidentification, impaired learning of new faces, disordered attention to faces, 'covert' recognition in prosopagnosia, and unawareness of impaired face recognition.