Abstrakt
Prosopagnosia is a neurocognitive deficit which is characterized by a severely impaired ability to recognize faces (Bodamer, 1947).This deficit cannot be attributed to a general loss of semantic memory or knowledge, as prosopagnosic patients can identify familiar people from their voice, gait, or salient facial features, such as a mustache. In associative prosopagnosia early perceptual processing of faces are considered to be intact, while the ability to access stored semantic information about the individual face or object is impaired (Anaki et al., 2007).
Recent claims, however, have asserted that associative prosopagnosia is also characterized by deficits at the perceptual level, which are too subtle to be detected by current neuropsychological tests. Thus, the impaired identification of famous faces in associative prosopagnosia stems from difficulties in extracting the minute perceptual details required to identify a face.
This pattern of behavior supports the notion that apperceptive and associative prosopagnosia reflect distinct and dissociated deficits, which result from damage to different stages of the face recognition process. We report the case of a patient with the isolated associative prosopagnosia and we highlight cognitive performance and diagnosticprocess that leads to the diagnosis.