Disorders of face perception and recognition

Face recognition is one of the most complex visual tasks performed by the human brain. In monkeys, area IT may play a key role in identifying faces, and functional imaging in humans suggests a homologue in the medial occipitotemporal cortex, named the fusiform face area (FFA). Damage to medial occipitotemporal structures can cause prosopagnosia, the failure to recognize familiar faces. Prosopagnosia is likely a family of dysfunctions affecting different perceptual and memory stages in face processing. Research on the nature of the encoding deficits and the functional-anatomic correlations in this syndrome are ongoing. Deficits in face perception may also contribute to Capgras syndrome and may be linked to the social dysfunction in autism or Asperger syndrome. More recently identified deficits in face processing include the false recognition of unfamiliar faces and the impaired extraction of social information from faces. Face perception deficits can be placed in the context of cognitive models of face processing, and continue to inform us about the nature of high-level vision and memory in humans.