ABSTRACT
J. Geskin and M. Behrmann present a literature review and meta-analysis focused on the face-specificity of congenital prosopagnosia (CP). The authors restate some important methodological guidelines that they have put forward from the very beginning in their work with acquired and developmental prosopagnosics, namely that a valid assessment of the face-specificity of visual deficits in CP requires that face and non-face recognition tasks be matched for stimulus complexity and processing demands. The extrastriate body area responded more to faces in the CP group than in the control group. Progress in understanding the neural network basis of face perception will require a range of comparisons, task contrasts, and control object categories that are different from those currently used, which are taken from common-sense ontology. Presumably, at the behavioural level and at the level of traditional neuropsychological tests, everyday object categories now in use will remain useful, as they allow people with deficits to describe their experiences and their troubles subjectively and phenomenologically.
