Erling Nørkær¹, Tone Roald¹, Randi Starrfelt¹; ¹University of Copenhagen

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a neurodevelopmental condition of unknown origin, characterized by lifelong difficulties in recognizing faces. Research in DP has increased starkly over the last two decades, but the increased interest has not resulted in consensus on how to characterize the condition. Most studies have taken an experimental approach based on cognitive neuropsychology and neuroscience, aiming to understand how cognition is affected and relate findings to models of neurotypical face processing. Here, we took a methodologically alternative approach, using in-depth interviews and phenomenological analyses to investigate what individuals with DP experience when they perceive and attempt to recognize familiar faces. Participants were six adults with DP as established by a standard diagnostic procedure. We analyzed our interview data using Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method in order to delineate a general structure of the DP experience. We found that face perception in DP is characterized by an unusual temporal and spatial instability of the percept; faces as whole gestalts quickly fade into facial fragments, and different visual instances of the same face can only be matched to one facial identity through conscious effort. The context in which the face appears takes the stage as perceptual figure, while faces are perceived as ground. Face recognition in DP is an effortful problem-solving process in which contextual and facial information is pieced together like clues to a mystery. Our findings suggest that faces hold an altogether different epistemological value for individuals with DP. Rather than being readily available, stable, identity marking gestalts, faces are fragmented, unstable and enigmatic visual objects that in themselves carry little or no information about who someone is. Our description of the phenomenology of DP may inspire new ways of investigating face processing in both experimental research and through clinical assessment tools of face recognition ability.

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by a grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark (grant number DFF-1024-00139B)