Boundaries of covert recognition in prosopagnosia

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Abstract
Since a severe closed head injury PH has been unable to recognise familiar faces overtly, but he shows a normal pattern of influences of face familiarity in matching, learning, and interference tasks which do not demand that the faces used are identified explicitly. In this paper we investigate the boundaries of these covert recognition effects. We show that PH cannot achieve overt access to any sense of a face's familiarity in forced-choice tasks (Tasks 1 and 2) and that in learning tasks he does not show evidence of covert access to names (Task 3) or to precise semantic information (Tasks 4 and 5) from the faces he sees. We suggest that covert recognition effects in prosopagnosia can thus be considered to reflect the operation of a partially isolated face recognition system.

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