ABSTRACT
The way in which facial information conveying people’s identity is processed by the mind/brain has long been the subject of serious scientific enquiry. How the process can become blocked or distorted by brain injury has provided valuable insights into the underlying mechanisms of this all-important sociobiological process, and what I want to discuss in this chapter are some conditions often but not invariably associated with psychopathology that have recently been seen to provide equally significant data. The value of such information in helping us understand normal information processing is the substance of the newly coined area of cognitive neuropsychiatry (David, 1993; Ellis, 1991). Some of the specific advantages for modelling face recognition were recently rehearsed by me in a paper demonstrating the two-way process of using models of cognitive process to understand pathological states and, where necessary, taking observations from cases where these are aberrant to modify those models (Ellis, 1998). Here, however, I want to concentrate on the aberrant processes themselves.
