Neural mechanisms of face encoding and recognition in developmental prosopagnosia and healthy controls
Poster Presentation: Saturday, May 17, 2025, 8:30 am – 12:30 pm, Pavilion
Session: Face and Body Perception: Neural
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Alison Campbell1,2, Michael Esterman1,2,3, Joseph DeGutis1,4; 1Boston Attention and Learning Laboratory, VA Boston Healthcare System, 2Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine, 3National Center for PTSD, VA Boston Healthcare System, 4Harvard Medical School
Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) has the potential to reveal neural mechanisms critical for face recognition, yet its neural basis remains unresolved. Although DP is characterized by an impaired ability to learn and recognize faces, previous research has relied almost exclusively on category localizers to examine activation to faces during passive viewing. By contrast, there is a near complete lack of research on neural processing when there is an explicit demand to encode and recognize faces. One possibility is that the neural regions that normally support face encoding and recognition are dysfunctional in DPs, leaving them to engage regions less or to rely on fewer or alternative regions. To investigate this question, we used event-related fMRI to compare DPs and neurotypical controls while they completed an old/new face recognition task. Notably, performance was equated between groups by reducing the number of study faces for DPs (8 blocks of 10) vs. controls (2 blocks of 40). Prior to the task of interest, participants performed a face/eye region/object localizer and we individually identified regions selective to faces (Faces>Objects) and eyes (Eyes>Objects) in the occipito-temporal (OFA, FFA), prefrontal (IFG), and medial temporal lobe (hippocampus, amygdala). In the face learning paradigm, participants alternated between blocks of study and test in the scanner and a subsequent memory analysis was used to compare successful encoding (subsequent hits > misses during study) and successful recognition (hits > misses during test) in the localized ROIs. Preliminary results show commonly reported group differences in face-selectivity, as well as a novel finding of reduced selectivity for the eye region in DPs. We also found that neural responses during successful encoding and recognition engaged similar medial temporal lobe and face-selective regions. This suggests that, during face learning and recognition, neural differences in DP are more quantitative rather than qualitative.
Acknowledgements: This work was supported by a grant to JD from the National Eye Institute (R01 EY032510-02).