Brain Advance Access originally published online on June 23, 2004
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Brain, Vol. 127, No. 8, 1706-1716,
August 2004
© 2004 Guarantors of Brain
doi: 10.1093/brain/awh194
Are patients with social developmental disorders prosopagnosic? Perceptual heterogeneity in the Asperger and socio-emotional processing disorders
Departments of 1 Neurology and 2 Ophthalmology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 3 Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Athinoula A. Martinos Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 4 Department of Bioengineering, Boston University, Boston, MA and 5 National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA
Correspondence to: Jason J. S. Barton, Department of Neurology, KS 452, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, 330 Brookline Avenue, Boston MA 02215, USA E-mail: jbarton{at}bidmc.harvard.edu
It has been hypothesized that social developmental disorders (SDD) like autism, Asperger's disorder and the social-emotional processing disorder may be associated with prosopagnosic-like deficits in face recognition. We studied the ability to recognize famous faces in 24 adults with a variety of SDD diagnoses. We also measured their ability to discriminate changes in internal facial configuration, a perceptual function that is important in face recognition, and their imagery for famous faces, an index of their facial memory stores. We contrasted their performance with both healthy subjects and prosopagnosic patients. We also performed a cluster analysis of the SDD patients. One group of eight SDD subjects performed normally on all tests of face perception and recognition. The other 16 subjects were impaired in recognition, though most were better than prosopagnosic patients. One impaired SDD subgroup had poor perception of facial structure but relatively preserved imagery, resembling prosopagnosic patients with medial occipitotemporal lesions. Another subgroup had better perception than imagery, resembling one prosopagnosic with bilateral anterior temporal lesions. Overall, SDD subgroup membership by face recognition did not correlate with a particular SDD diagnosis or subjective ratings of social impairment.We conclude that the social disturbance in SDD does not invariably lead to impaired face recognition. Abnormal face recognition in some SDD subjects is related to impaired perception of facial structure in a manner suggestive of occipitotemporal dysfunction. Heterogeneity in the perceptual processing of faces may imply pathogenetic heterogeneity, with important implications for genetic and rehabilitative studies of SDD.
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