Hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces after left lateral temporo-occipital XXXX : a double dissociation with @entity10400 .

@entity1 @entity697 @entity51 @entity1188 @entity10400
Right hemisphere dominance in face processing is well established and unilateral right inferior temporo-occipital damage can result in @entity10400 . Here, we describe a 21-year-old right-handed @entity1 with @entity697 in face recognition that selectively concerned unfamiliar faces, following a focal left lateral temporo-occipital @entity1188 . She was severely impaired in discerning that unknown @entity1 seen in everyday life were unfamiliar, although she had no difficulty recognizing familiar @entity1 . Thus, she had no @entity10400 , but abnormal 'hyperfamiliarity' for unknown faces. Her difficulty was not accompanied by @entity51 in discrimination, identification or memory for faces. Standard neuropsychological testing showed that her recognition of familiar faces was entirely normal. By contrast, her sense of personally knowing faces was severely impaired when unknown faces evoked weak signals of familiarity based on spurious cues, to the extent that she would misattribute fame to faces that were unknown but to which she had been incidentally exposed on a prior occasion. Priming experiments also revealed that, unlike normal subjects, she made familiarity judgements without accessing semantic identity representations. Moreover, in face recognition tests, she generally showed bias in that she relied more on right-hemisphere strategies to identify global traits and less on left-hemisphere processes compared with healthy subjects. This case provides novel evidence for a differential contribution of the two hemispheres to face recognition. Hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces might arise from an imbalance between reciprocal hemispheric functions in face recognition, with relative hypoactivation of left hemisphere processes but hyperactivation of right-hemisphere processes for retrieving stored associations about @entity1 , linking seen faces to representations of affective and personal relevance. Hence, abnormal bias in attributing some personal meaning to unknown faces could be evoked by spurious signals of familiarity based on irrelevant affective associations in the right hemisphere.
