Abstract
Despite many findings showing dissociations of face and object perception, little is known about face and body perception in prosopagnosia. Here we present a systematic investigation of face and body perception in KH, a 29 year-old female who became prosopagnosic following a right amygdala-hippocampus resection. We tested KH in five perceptual experiments comparing faces and bodies: speeded detection, shape matching, feature and position matching, sex discrimination, and attractiveness rating. While KH was impaired with faces across all tasks, her performance with bodies was well-within the normal range, except for attractiveness rating. These face and body dissociations add to neurophysiological, neuroimaging, and psychophysical evidence indicating separate mechanisms for face and body perception. Moreover, despite her impaired face perception, KH showed a normal inversion effect for whole body positions but not for headless body positions. This particular finding challenges the hypothesis that the body inversion effect originates in the face perception system (Yovel et al., 2010) and suggests a further dissociation between face and head perception.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012