Bilateral hemispheric processing of words and faces: evidence from word impairments in prosopagnosia and face impairments in pure alexia.
Considerable research has supported the view that faces and words are subserved by independent neural mechanisms located in the ventral visual cortex in opposite hemispheres. On this view, right hemisphere ventral lesions that impair face recognition (prosopagnosia) should leave word recognition unaffected, and left hemisphere ventral lesions that impair word recognition (pure alexia) should leave face recognition unaffected. The current study shows that neither of these predictions was upheld. A series of experiments characterizing speed and accuracy of word and face recognition were conducted in 7 patients (4 pure alexic, 3 prosopagnosic) and matched controls. Prosopagnosic patients revealed mild but reliable word recognition deficits, and pure alexic patients demonstrated mild but reliable face recognition deficits. The apparent comingling of face and word mechanisms is unexpected from a domain-specific perspective, but follows naturally as a consequence of an interactive, learning-based account in which neural processes for both faces and words are the result of an optimization procedure embodying specific computational principles and constraints.
['Behrmann|Marlene|M|', 'Plaut|David C|DC|']
D000368:Aged D000369:Aged, 80 and over D020237:Alexia, Pure D000704:Analysis of Variance D016022:Case-Control Studies D005145:Face D005260:Female D007839:Functional Laterality D006801:Humans D008297:Male D008875:Middle Aged D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual D020238:Prosopagnosia D011930:Reaction Time D012660:Semantics D014825:Vocabulary
prosopagnosia pure alexia face recognition word recognition hemispheric specialization lateralization of function