Eye movements and retinotopic tuning in developmental prosopagnosia
Name
i1534-7362-19-9-7.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.44 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
fd0c6dc723d25bf01449770bd8394c69
Author(s)
Peterson, Matthew F
Zaun, Ian E.
Hoke, Harris
Jiahui, Guo
Duchaine, Brad
Kanwisher, Nancy
Date Issued
August 2019
Journal
Journal of Vision
Publisher
Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO)
Citation
Peterson, Matthew F. et al. "Eye movements and retinotopic tuning in developmental prosopagnosia." Journal of Vision 19, 9 (August 2019):1-19 © 2019 The Authors
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Despite extensive investigation, the causes and nature of developmental prosopagnosia (DP)-a severe face identification impairment in the absence of acquired brain injury-remain poorly understood. Drawing on previous work showing that individuals identified as being neurotypical (NT) show robust individual differences in where they fixate on faces, and recognize faces best when the faces are presented at this location, we defined and tested four novel hypotheses for how atypical face-looking behavior and/or retinotopic face encoding could impair face recognition in DP: (a) fixating regions of poor information, (b) inconsistent saccadic targeting, (c) weak retinotopic tuning, and (d) fixating locations not matched to the individual's own face tuning. We found no support for the first three hypotheses, with NTs and DPs consistently fixating similar locations and showing similar retinotopic tuning of their face perception performance. However, in testing the fourth hypothesis, we found preliminary evidence for two distinct phenotypes of DP: (a) Subjects characterized by impaired face memory, typical face perception, and a preference to look high on the face, and (b) Subjects characterized by profound impairments to both face memory and perception and a preference to look very low on the face. Further, while all NTs and upper-looking DPs performed best when faces were presented near their preferred fixation location, this was not true for lower-looking DPs. These results suggest that face recognition deficits in a substantial proportion of people with DP may arise not from aberrant face gaze or compromised retinotopic tuning, but from the suboptimal matching of gaze to tuning.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1167/19.9.7
