ABSTRACT
The main aim of Geskin and Behrmann’s review is to “elucidate the nature of the relationship between impairments in face and non-face object recognition, and, in so doing, to characterize the functional architecture of visual recognition”. The aim “to characterize the functional architecture of visual recognition” is typical of cognitive neuropsychological studies, where the relationship between impaired and preserved performance across tasks is used to create or revise models of normal cognitive function. Geskin and Behrmann discuss the struggle to find tasks that are well matched across categories and raise problem of test sensitivity. One reason that dissociations are considered better evidence than associations in cognitive neuropsychology is that there may be many reasons for performance on two tasks to be associated, while the preferred explanation for a dissociation is that two independent systems are operating. It is also clear that congenital prosopagnosia is surprisingly selective as developmental deficits go, and affects face processing disproportionally compared to other visual stimuli.
