ABSTRACT
In their review, J. Geskin and M. Berhmann re-examined 716 cases of congenital prosopagnosia to determine the prevalence of object recognition deficits that were associated with impaired face recognition. However, problematic for this interpretation was the small number of pure prosopagnosic patients who showed preserved object recognition abilities as measured by normal accuracy and response times. The obvious problem with this task is that the perceptual similarity between a pigeon and a warbler is not equated with the perceptual similarity between individual faces. This problem highlights a deeper issue in the common approach of comparing recognition of faces to the recognition of within-category objects. However, subordinate level category members can differ significantly in their structural similarity to one another, and, as a consequence, it may be more perceptually demanding to discriminate one subordinate object from its distractors than another subordinate object.
