Dataset Information

Self-reported face recognition is highly valid, but alone is not highly discriminative of prosopagnosia-level performance on objective assessments.

ABSTRACT: Severe developmental deficits in face recognition ability (developmental prosopagnosia, or DP) have been vigorously studied over the past decade, yet many questions remain unanswered about their origins, nature, and social consequences. A rate-limiting factor in answering such questions is the challenge of recruiting rare DP participants. Although self-reported experiences have long played a role in efforts to identify DPs, much remains unknown about how such self-reports can or should contribute to screening or diagnosis. Here, in a large, population-based web sample, we investigated the effectiveness of self-report, used on its own, as a screen to identify individuals who will ultimately fail, at a conventional cutoff, the two types of objective tests that are most commonly used to confirm DP diagnoses: the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT) and the famous faces memory test (FFMT). We used a highly reliable questionnaire (alpha = .91), the Cambridge Face Memory Questionnaire (CFMQ), and revealed strong validity via high correlations of .44 with the CFMT and .52 with the FFMT. However, cutoff analyses revealed that no CFMQ score yielded a clinical-grade combination of sensitivity and positive predictive value in enough individuals to support using it alone as a DP diagnostic or screening tool. This result was replicated in an analysis of data from the widely used PI20 questionnaire, a 20-question self-assessment of facial recognition similar in form to the CFMQ. We therefore recommend that screens for DP should, wherever possible, include objective as well as subjective assessment tools.

SUBMITTER: Arizpe JM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6527346 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Self-reported face recognition is highly valid, but alone is not highly discriminative of prosopagnosia-level performance on objective assessments.

Arizpe Joseph M JM Saad Elyana E Douglas Ayooluwa O AO Germine Laura L Wilmer Jeremy B JB DeGutis Joseph M JM

Behavior research methods 20190601 3

Severe developmental deficits in face recognition ability (developmental prosopagnosia, or DP) have been vigorously studied over the past decade, yet many questions remain unanswered about their origins, nature, and social consequences. A rate-limiting factor in answering such questions is the challenge of recruiting rare DP participants. Although self-reported experiences have long played a role in efforts to identify DPs, much remains unknown about how such self-reports can or should contribut ...[more]

PMID: 30761463

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Project description:Rationale: Face expertise is a pivotal social skill. Developmental prosopagnosia (DP), i.e., the inability to recognize faces without a history of brain damage, affects about 2% of the general population, and is a renowned model system of the face-processing network. Within this network, the right Fusiform Face Area (FFA), is particularly involved in face identity processing and may therefore be a key element in DP. Neural representations within the FFA have been examined with Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA), a data-analytical framework in which multi-unit measures of brain activity are assessed with correlation analysis. Objectives: Our study intended to scrutinize modifications of FFA-activation during face encoding and maintenance based on RSA. Methods: Thirteen participants with DP (23-70 years) and 12 healthy control subjects (19-62 years) participated in a functional MRI study, including morphological MRI, a functional FFA-localizer and a modified Sternberg paradigm probing face memory encoding and maintenance. Memory maintenance of one, two, or four faces represented low, medium, and high memory load. We examined conventional activation differences in response to working memory load and applied RSA to compute individual correlation-matrices on the voxel level. Group correlation-matrices were compared via Donsker's random walk analysis. Results: On the functional level, increased memory load entailed both a higher absolute FFA-activation level and a higher degree of correlation between activated voxels. Both aspects were deficient in DP. Interestingly, control participants showed a homogeneous degree of correlation for successful trials during the experiment. In DP-participants, correlation levels between FFA-voxels were significantly lower and were less sustained during the experiment. In behavioral terms, DP-participants performed poorer and had longer reaction times in relation to DP-severity. Furthermore, correlation levels were negatively correlated with reaction times for the most demanding high load condition. Conclusion: We suggest that participants with DP fail to generate robust and maintained neural representations in the FFA during face encoding and maintenance, in line with poorer task performance and prolonged reaction times. In DP, alterations of neural coding in the FFA might therefore explain curtailing in working memory and contribute to impaired long-term memory and mental imagery.

Dataset Information

Self-reported face recognition is highly valid, but alone is not highly discriminative of prosopagnosia-level performance on objective assessments.

Publications

Self-reported face recognition is highly valid, but alone is not highly discriminative of prosopagnosia-level performance on objective assessments.

Similar Datasets

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