Investigating face processing impairments in Developmental Prosopagnosia: Insights from behavioural tasks and lived experience
The defining characteristic of development prosopagnosia is severe difficulty recognising familiar faces in everyday life. Numerous studies have reported that the condition is highly heterogeneous in terms of both presentation and severity with many mixed findings in the literature. I will present behavioural data from a large face processing test battery (n = 24 DPs) as well as some early findings from a larger survey of the lived experience of individuals with DP and discuss how insights from individuals' real-world experience can help to understand and interpret lab-based data.
What's wrong with the prosopagnosia literature? A new approach to diagnosing and researching the condition
Developmental prosopagnosia is characterised by severe, lifelong difficulties when recognising facial identity. Most researchers require prosopagnosia cases exhibit ultra-conservative levels of impairment on the Cambridge Face Memory Test before they include them in their experiments. This results in the majority of people who believe that they have this condition being excluded from the scientific literature. In this talk I outline the many issues that will afflict prosopagnosia research if this continues, and show that these excluded cases do exhibit impairments on all commonly used diagnostic tests when a group-based method of assessment is utilised. I propose a paradigm shift away from cognitive task-based approaches to diagnosing prosopagnosia, and outline a new way that researchers can investigate this condition.
Super-Recognizers: facts, fallacies, and the future
Over the past decade, the domain of face identity processing has seen a surging interest in inter-individual differences, with a focus on individuals with superior skills, so-called Super-Recognizers (SRs; Ramon et al., 2019; Russell et al., 2009). Their study can provide valuable insights into brain-behavior relationships and advance our understanding of neural functioning. Despite a decade of research, and similarly to the field of developmental prosopagnosia, a consensus on diagnostic criteria for SR identification is lacking. Consequently, SRs are currently identified either inconsistently, via suboptimal individual tests, or via undocumented collections of tests. This state of the field has two major implications. Firstly, our scientific understanding of SRs will remain at best limited. Secondly, the needs of government agencies interested in deploying SRs for real-life identity verification (e.g., policing) are unlikely to be met. To counteract these issues, I suggest the following action points. Firstly, based on our and others’ work suggesting novel and challenging tests of face cognition (Bobak et al., 2019; Fysh et al., in press; Stacchi et al., 2019), and my collaborations with international security agencies, I recommend novel diagnostic criteria for SR identification. These are currently being used to screen the Berlin State Police’s >25K employees before identifying SRs via bespoke testing procedures we have collaboratively developed over the past years. Secondly, I introduce a cohort of SRs identified using these criteria, which is being studied in-depth using behavioral methods, psychophysics, eye-tracking, and neuroimaging. Finally, I suggest data acquired for these individuals should be curated to develop and share best practices with researchers and practitioners, and to gain an accurate and transparent description of SR cases to exploit their informative value.