Individuals with Prosopagnosia have impaired _______ face recognition, but preserved _______ face recognition.
The correct answer and explanation is:
Answer:
Individuals with Prosopagnosia have impaired explicit face recognition, but preserved implicit face recognition.
Explanation (300 words):
Prosopagnosia, also known as “face blindness,” is a neurological condition characterized by the inability to recognize familiar faces. This impairment primarily affects explicit face recognition, which is the conscious and deliberate ability to identify or name a face. People with prosopagnosia often fail to recognize even close family members, friends, or their own reflection in some cases, despite having normal vision and memory otherwise.
Explicit face recognition relies on higher-level cognitive processes involving the fusiform face area (FFA) in the brain, located in the temporal lobe. This area is specialized for processing facial identity and is crucial for conscious awareness of who the person is. Damage or dysfunction in this region or its neural network often causes prosopagnosia.
On the other hand, individuals with prosopagnosia typically have preserved implicit face recognition. Implicit recognition means they can still process some facial information unconsciously or emotionally, even though they cannot consciously identify the face. For example, they might show physiological responses like changes in skin conductance (sweating) or emotional reactions when seeing a familiar face, even if they cannot say who it is. This suggests that some neural pathways responsible for emotional or subconscious processing of faces (e.g., connections involving the amygdala) remain intact.
Research using behavioral and physiological tests supports this dissociation between explicit and implicit face recognition. This distinction explains why some people with prosopagnosia might still respond appropriately in social contexts without being able to name or recognize the person explicitly.
In summary, prosopagnosia primarily disrupts the conscious, explicit recognition of faces but leaves intact the implicit, unconscious processing of facial familiarity, highlighting the complexity and modularity of face processing in the human brain.