Introduction

Prosopagnosia is the inability to recognize faces, and can occur following brain damage, or be lifelong as a result of maldevelopment of face recognition skills. The face specificity of prosopagnosia will also shed light on the basic architecture of human visual recognition. This special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology brings together leading researchers who collectively debate and discuss the face specificity of prosopagnosia, focusing on the lifelong form. K. L. H. Gray and R. Cook offer a similar argument, reasoning that associated face and object deficits in prosopagnosia may not reflect common deficits, but rather separate deficits that often co-occur due to genetic and environmental factors. The neural basis of prosopagnosia is discussed by G. Rosenthal and A. Avidan, who highlight recent imaging studies that detect abnormal connectivity across the posterior and anterior face-selective areas in prosopagnosia.