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Brain Advance Access published online on November 3, 2009
Brain, doi:10.1093/brain/awp271
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© The Author(s) 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Brain.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Voxel-based morphometry reveals reduced grey matter volume in the temporal cortex of developmental prosopagnosics

Lúcia Garrido1, Nicholas Furl2, Bogdan Draganski3, Nikolaus Weiskopf2, John Stevens4, Geoffrey Chern-Yee Tan2, Jon Driver1,2, Ray J. Dolan2 and Bradley Duchaine1

1 UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London WC1N 3AR, UK 2 UCL Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, London WC1N 3BG, UK 3 Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig 04103, Germany 4 UCL Institute of Neurology, University College London, London WC1N 3BG, UK

Correspondence to: Lúcia Garrido, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK E-mail: m.garrido{at}ucl.ac.uk

Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia exhibit severe and lasting difficulties in recognizing faces despite the absence of apparent brain abnormalities. We used voxel-based morphometry to investigate whether developmental prosopagnosics show subtle neuroanatomical differences from controls. An analysis based on segmentation of T1-weighted images from 17 developmental prosopagnosics and 18 matched controls revealed that they had reduced grey matter volume in the right anterior inferior temporal lobe and in the superior temporal sulcus/middle temporal gyrus bilaterally. In addition, a voxel-based morphometry analysis based on the segmentation of magnetization transfer parameter maps showed that developmental prosopagnosics also had reduced grey matter volume in the right middle fusiform gyrus and the inferior temporal gyrus. Multiple regression analyses relating three distinct behavioural component scores, derived from a principal component analysis, to grey matter volume revealed an association between a component related to facial identity and grey matter volume in the left superior temporal sulcus/middle temporal gyrus plus the right middle fusiform gyrus/inferior temporal gyrus. Grey matter volume in the lateral occipital cortex was associated with component scores related to object recognition tasks. Our results demonstrate that developmental prosopagnosics have reduced grey matter volume in several regions known to respond selectively to faces and provide new evidence that integrity of these areas relates to face recognition ability.

Key Words: developmental prosopagnosia; voxel-based morphometry; face recognition; object recognition; perception; temporal cortex

Abbreviations: CFMT, Cambridge Face Memory Test; ITG, inferior temporal gyrus; MDEFT, modified driven equilibrium fourier transform; MT, magnetization transfer; MTG, middle temporal gyrus; STS, superior temporal sulcus; SVC, small volume correction; VBM, voxel-based morphometry

Received May 27, 2009. Revised August 21, 2009. Accepted September 15, 2009.


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