A particularly interesting and somewhat puzzling finding in the face-processing literature is that, despite the absence of overt recognition of most faces, many patients with acquired prosopagnosia (AP) exhibit evidence of intact covert face recognition of the very same faces. This phenomenon has important implications for the understanding of the mechanism underlying AP and, by extension, the mechanism underlying normal face processing. Here, we set out to examine whether individuals with congenital prosopagnosia (CP) exhibit a similar dissociation between overt and covert face recognition. We first confirmed that all six of our CP individuals were significantly impaired in face recognition in comparison with controls. Participants then completed a matching task with both famous and unknown faces in which they decided whether two consecutive images have the same identity or not. Critically, the level of face familiarity was orthogonal to the task at hand and this enabled us to examine whether the familiarity of a face enhanced identity matching, a finding which would implicate implicit face processing. As expected, the CP individuals were slower and less accurate than the control participants. More importantly, like the controls, the CP individuals were faster and more accurate at matching famous compared with unknown faces. Also, for both groups, matching performance on unrecognized famous faces fell at an intermediate level between performance on explicitly recognized famous faces and faces which are unknown. These results provide the first solid evidence for the existence of implicit familiarity processing in CP and suggest that, despite the marked impairment in explicit face recognition, these individuals still have some familiarity representation which manifests in the form of covert recognition. We discuss possible models to account for the apparent dissociation of overt and covert face processing in CPR.

中文翻译：

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先天性前瞻性内隐隐式熟悉处理。

在面部处理文献中，一个特别有趣且令人费解的发现是，尽管大多数面部没有明显的识别，但许多患有后遗症（AP）的患者显示出对相同面部的完整隐性面部识别的证据。这种现象对于理解AP的机制以及从广义上来说是正常人脸处理的机制具有重要意义。在这里，我们着手检查先天性prosopagnosia（CP）的个人是否表现出明显和隐秘的面部识别之间类似的分离。我们首先确认，与对照组相比，我们的所有6位CP个体的面部识别能力均明显受损。然后，参与者用著名面孔和未知面孔完成匹配任务，他们决定两个连续的图像是否具有相同的身份。至关重要的是，人脸的熟悉程度与手头的任务是正交的，这使我们能够检查人脸的熟悉程度是否增强了身份匹配，这一发现将暗示隐式人脸处理。正如预期的那样，CP个体比对照组参与者慢且准确性低。更重要的是，像控制者一样，与未知面孔相比，CP个体在匹配著名人物方面更快，更准确。而且，对于这两个群体，在未被识别的著名面孔上的匹配表现落在被明确识别的著名面孔和未知面孔之间的表现的中间水平。这些结果为CP中存在隐式熟悉处理提供了第一个有力的证据，并表明，尽管显着面部识别能力明显受损，这些人仍然具有一些隐蔽识别形式的熟悉表示。我们讨论了可能的模型，以说明CPR中明显和隐蔽的面部处理的分离。