The nature of the perceptual deficit seen in developmental prosopagnosia remains poorly understood. One possibility is that these individuals experience face recognition difficulties because they fail to process faces holistically; they may be less able to analyze distal regions in parallel and therefore struggle to integrate information from different regions into a unified perceptual whole. Consequently, developmental prosopagnosics may be forced to base perceptual decisions on a slow, effortful piecemeal analysis of local facial features. In the present study, we sought to test this view by comparing the face recognition of developmental prosopagnosics and typical observers under two viewing conditions: when target faces were briefly presented in their entirety, and when they were inspected region-by-region through a dynamic aperture. If developmental prosopagnosics are forced to base perceptual decisions on information accumulated from a serial piecemeal analysis, one would expect little if any decrement in performance when target faces are viewed through apertures. Contrary to this prediction, however, developmental prosopagnosics showed strong aperture effects comparable with typical observers; their perceptual decisions were more accurate in the whole-face condition than when targets were viewed through the aperture. As expected, the developmental prosopagnosics were less accurate than typical controls when judging briefly presented faces shown in their entirety. Strikingly, however, they were also less able to accumulate perceptual evidence from a serial region-by-region analysis, than typical observers. Our results suggest that the perceptual problems seen in this population arise from imprecise descriptions of local regions, not aberrant holistic processing.

在发展性更年期中看到的知觉缺陷的性质仍然知之甚少。一种可能是这些人由于无法整体处理面部而遇到面部识别困难。他们可能无法并行分析远端区域，因此难以将来自不同区域的信息整合到统一的感知整体中。因此，发展性假体医学可能被迫基于对局部面部特征的缓慢，费力的零碎分析来做出感知决策。在本研究中，我们试图通过在两种观察条件下比较发育假体学和典型观察者的面部识别来测试这种观点：何时简要介绍了目标面部的全部情况，以及通过动态方式逐个区域地检查了他们光圈。如果强迫发展的假体医学专家根据一系列零散分析中积累的信息做出感知决策，那么当通过光圈观察目标面部时，人们对性能的降低几乎没有期望。然而，与这一预测相反，发育前假体显示出与典型观察者相当的强光圈效应。与通过光圈观察目标时相比，他们在整个面部情况下的感知决策更为准确。不出所料，当判断简短呈现的整体面孔时，发育前的诊断学的准确性低于典型对照。令人惊讶的是，与典型的观察者相比，他们从连续的逐区域分析中积累知觉证据的能力也较弱。