Voice Perception in Prosopagnosia R R Liu1, R Pancaroglu2, J J S Barton2 |
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1Vancouver General Hospital Eye Care Centre, University of British Columbia, BC, Canada |
| Right or bilateral anterior temporal damage can impair face recognition, while leaving face discrimination relatively intact. While this is often considered an associative type of prosopagnosia, similar lesions can also cause a multimodal person-specific semantic disorder. Although many subjects claim that they can still recognize people by voice, this has seldom been tested formally. We developed a new face and voice discrimination test. For face discrimination, a neutral target face is followed by two smiling choice-faces, and subjects identify which choice-face matched the target. For voice discrimination, a target voice reading a short sentence is followed by two choice-voices reading a different sentence, and subjects identify the choice-voice that matched the target. In 22 healthy subjects, we found that performance had good testing characteristics, with results that were not at ceiling and which had low variance. In one prosopagnosic subject with bilateral fusiform lesions we found impaired face discrimination but preserved voice discrimination. Two prosopagnosic subjects with anterior temporal lesions had preserved discrimination of both voices and faces, despite impaired face recognition on other tests. These findings show that discrimination of voices is intact after either anterior temporal or fusiform lesions in patients with impaired face recognition. [This work was supported by grants awarded to Ran R Liu from the Fight for Sight Foundation and the American Academy of Neurology.] |
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