Prosopdysgnosia? What could it tell us about the neural organization of face and object recognition?

Geskin and Behrmann analyzed more than 700 scientific reports of people suffering from long-term developmental difficulties at individual face recognition (IFR) published over four decades. The goal of their review, an invaluable contribution for the field, is to enlighten the long-standing issue of whether faces are handled by a specific neural visual recognition system or if face and non-face objects share the same system. It is worth reminding that Bodamer coined the term prosopagnosia as a selective neurological disorder of IFR, stressing that the recognition deficit could “appear in varying strengths and together with the various forms of agnosia, but could be separated from these from the outset”. Given that prosopagnosia was initially defined as a form of visual agnosia, the recognition deficit has to be modality-specific, yet unaccountable by low-level visual defects and/or intellectual impairments. The authors point to insufficient documentation of most reported cases of prosopdysgnosia, especially for the limited proportion (20%) with apparent preserved object recognition.