Intact sex perception in a young acquired prosopagnosic

Studies of brain-damaged participants have shown that certain aspects of face processing are dissociable, e.g. face identity and expression, but we have little understanding of the organization of the mechanisms underlying face perception. Here we present findings from Wren, a 25-year-old right-handed woman who, following two closed head injuries on the same day at age 18, has severe difficulties with many aspects of face processing but intact recognition of sex from the face. Structural brain imaging and a functional localizer did not reveal any abnormalities. Across ten tests of identity processing, Wren showed clear impairments. She also exhibited deficits with face detection, perception of eye position, and facial expression recognition. In contrast, she scored normally on three tests of face sex discrimination. Two of the tests involved judging if a stimulus with noise was male or female. The third test involved deciding if a portion of the face was male or female based on a view limited to eyes (Baron-Cohen et. al 2001). To confirm that Wren’s identity recognition deficits are restricted to the visual modality, we showed that she performs normally on voice identity tests. In summary, Wren’s results reveal that narrow aspects of face perception can be selectively preserved after brain damage and indicate that different aspects of invariant face perception rely on separable mechanisms.