Perceptual encoding and imagery in prosopagnosia

面部失认症的知觉编码和意象

• 批准号: 7028619
• 负责人: Jason J Barton
• 金额: $ 11.46万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2003
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2003-12-01 至 2008-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7028619
• 关键词: agnosia; brain injury; clinical research; face; functional magnetic resonance imaging; human subject; imagery; memory; neural information processing; neuroanatomy; neuropsychological tests; psychological models; visual feedback; visual perception; visual stimulus

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recognizing faces, a critical social skill, is among the most challenging perceptual and memory tasks the human visual system performs. Some patients with cerebral lesions suffer from prosopagnosia, a relatively selective failure to recognize faces. The overall aim of our work is to advance our understanding of the basis of this unusual failure in different patients, both in its functional and anatomic aspects, information that is important also for cognitive theories of normal face processing. We focus on several key issues. First, in some patients the recognition problem is due to a failure to perceive the structure of a face. By using facial stimuli with carefully manipulated changes, we will characterize the type of structural encoding that is lacking. These focus upon theorized distinctions between features, external contour, internal facial geometry, and normative rules of facial structure. We compare these data to parallel studies of normal subjects viewing inverted faces, a maneuver said to disable the normal adult human expertise with faces. Our protocols will address not only what is seen in faces but also how these data are processed in both normal subjects and patients. We will also use non-facial stimuli to determine if the encoding defect is selective for faces or involves other objects, a point of theoretical importance debated in both the patient and functional imaging literature. To clarify the specificity of the perceptual encoding defects in prosopagnosia that we uncover, we perform parallel studies in similar patients with medial occipitotemporal damage but not prosopagnosia. We use both behavioral studies to characterize their function, and functional imaging to characterize the structure-function correlations in both prosopagnosic and non-prosopagnosic controls. Second, we focus on another stage in cognitive models of face processing, facial memories. We use imagery to examine not only the status of facial memories, but the type of facial memories present (feature- or configuration-based). We hypothesize that anterior temporal structures may be critical to this function, and propose a study of patients with temporal lobectomy to address the question of the anatomic correlate of facial memories. Last, we integrate the perceptual and imagery data in prosopagnosia in a study of covert recognition. From our prior work, we hypothesize that covert or unconscious recognition is the residual product of a partially damaged face network in the brain. We propose a functional imaging experiment to test this hypothesis.

描述（由申请人提供）：识别面孔，一种关键的社会技能，是人类视觉系统执行的最具挑战性的感知和记忆任务之一。一些脑损伤患者患有prosopagnosia，这是一种相对选择性的识别面孔的。我们工作的总体目的是促进我们对不同患者这种异常失败的基础的理解，无论是在其功能和解剖方面，这些信息对于正常面部处理的认知理论也很重要。 我们专注于几个关键问题。首先，在某些患者中，识别问题是由于未能感知面部的结构。通过使用经过精心操纵的更改的面部刺激，我们将表征缺少的结构编码的类型。这些侧重于特征，外部轮廓，内部面部几何形状和面部结构规范规则之间的理论区别。我们将这些数据与对观察倒脸的正常受试者的平行研究进行了比较，据说可以禁用正常的成人人类专业知识。我们的方案不仅将解决面部中看到的内容，而且还将如何处理正常受试者和患者中的这些数据。我们还将使用非种族刺激来确定编码缺陷是针对面孔还是涉及其他对象的选择性，这是患者和功能成像文献中辩论的理论重要性点。为了阐明我们发现的prosopagnosia的感知编码缺陷的特异性，我们在类似的枕颞内侧损伤但没有prosopagnosia的患者中进行平行研究。我们使用两种行为研究来表征其功能，并使用功能成像来表征prosopagnosic和非掌态控制中的结构功能相关性。 其次，我们专注于面部处理，面部记忆的认知模型的另一个阶段。我们使用图像不仅检查面部记忆的状态，而且检查存在的面部记忆的类型（基于功能或配置）。我们假设前时间结构可能对此功能至关重要，并提出了对颞叶切除术患者的研究，以解决面部记忆的解剖学相关性问题。 最后，我们在秘密识别的研究中整合了prosopagnosia中的感知和图像数据。从我们的先前工作中，我们假设秘密或无意识的识别是大脑中部分损坏的面部网络的残留产物。我们提出了一个功能成像实验来检验该假设。