ABSTRACT
The main goal of the survey is to address a longstanding debate in the cognitive neuroscience literature pertaining to the extent to which face and object processing share the same cognitive and neural mechanisms. The main outcome of this review is that roughly two-thirds of the documented individuals diagnosed with congenital prosopagnosia (CP) also appear to have an impairment in object processing. Beyond the cognitive level, the findings also raise questions regarding the neural models that could underlie such behavioral heterogeneity. Normal face recognition appears to be accomplished via the coordinated activity of multiple nodes of a distributed neural network. At the neural level, such a general deficit in integral, holistic processing may be compatible with recent findings showing that in CP individuals, population receptive field size across the ventral stream as measured with fMRI were smaller compared to controls. Neural diagnosis might allow us to overcome some of the inherent difficulties of the behavioral diagnosis of this disorder.
