Abstract
Humans gradually learn from unfamiliar face repetitions to achieve expert face recognition. However, for individuals suffering developmental prosopagnosia (DP), a neurodevelopmental disorder specifically impairing face recognition, it is unknown how they are impaired in facial experience accumulation. Here we used repetition suppression (RS) and multi-voxel pattern analysis to comprehensively investigate the neural deficits of DP during unfamiliar face repetitions. We found that both RS of bilateral fusiform face area (FFA) and pattern similarity of bilateral medial temporal lobe (MTL) approximating the perirhinal cortex (PrC)/hippocampus were abnormal in DP, indicating deficits in both perceptual processing in the FFA and memory maintenance in the MTL. Moreover, resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) between the right FFA and left PrC/hippocampus was also disrupted. Further exploratory factor analysis indicated that the multi-stage deficits in DP were not only caused by propagation from upstream perceptual disruptions, but also contributed by independent disruption in downstream memory stage. In addition, pattern similarity of the left hippocampus/PrC was related to DP's severity in long-term face memory deficit. In short, our study provided the first systematical neural evidence that DPs were deficient in learning from unfamiliar face repetitions and cast new light on the way in which unfamiliar faces may become familiar in normal population.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018