ABSTRACT
J. Geskin & M. Behrmann provide an extensive and scholarly meta-analysis of the extant cases of developmental prosopagnosia in order to ascertain how often impairments in face recognition and object recognition co-occur, mirroring an influential review of the acquired agnosias by Farah published in this journal. The use of population-level analysis to infer cognitive structure can be traced back to the roots of individual differences psychometric research including study of intelligence. Moreover, there are many other good reasons to believe in category-specificity in the cognitive and neural architecture. Yet according to Geskin & Behrmann’s analysis, the DP population generally shows a much greater association between face and object recognition than might be expected. The domain-general account offered by Geskin and Behrmann predicts that the extent of an observer’s deficit in one category ought to relate closely to their relative performance in other categories.
