Putting Memory back into Face Recognition: Aspects of Face Recollection Contribute to Deficits in Developmental Prosopagnosia

Abstract

Though face perception deficits in developmental prosopagnosia (DP) have been well described, face memory deficits in DP are relatively poorly characterized. We recently found that DPs have deficient face recollection memory, all-or-none retrieval of detailed information, but intact familiarity, feeling of knowing. In the current study, we had 45 DPs and 120 controls perform three face memory tasks to further characterize aspects of recollection: 1) An old/new task to infer recollection/familiarity from confidence ratings, 2) Face/scene task to examine face-scene associative memory and collect remember-know judgments and, 3) Face/name-occupation task to assess learning semantic associations with faces. Recollection scores from old/new ROC analysis and face/scene remember-know replicated that, compared to controls, DPs had deficient recollection (old/new p<0.001, d=0.92, face/scene p<0.001 d=0.57). In the face/scene task, DPs also had reduced scene accuracy for correct faces (p<0.001), suggesting deficits with recalling face-related contextual information. In the face/name-occupation task, DPs recalled fewer proper names than controls (p<0.001) but performed similarly in remembering occupations (p=0.56). Overall, DPs’ recollection deficits were weakly correlated with each other, suggesting that they may reflect distinct processes or are task specific. Notably, DPs also showed poorer familiarity than controls on the old/new (p=0.005 d=0.53) and face/scene tasks (p<0.001 d=0.67), but only recollection deficits remained significant after controlling for face perception abilities. Recollection measures from all three tasks together predicted 10.9% of unique variance in CFMT score independent of perception abilities and 29.4% of variance in DP diagnosis. Together, these results suggest that DPs may have multiple types of face recollection deficits or rather that their recollection deficits are task specific.