Face matching impairment in developmental prosopagnosia

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is commonly referred to as ‘face blindness’, a term that implies a perceptual basis to the condition. However, DP presents as a deficit in face recognition and is diagnosed using memory-based tasks. Here, we test face identification ability in six people with DP, who are severely impaired on face memory tasks, using tasks that do not rely on memory. First, we compared DP to control participants on a standardised test of unfamiliar face matching using facial images taken on the same day and under standardised studio conditions (Glasgow Face Matching Test; GFMT). DP participants did not differ from normative accuracy scores on the GFMT. Second, we tested face matching performance on a test created using images that were sourced from the Internet and so vary substantially due to changes in viewing conditions and in a person’s appearance (Local Heroes Test; LHT). DP participants show significantly poorer matching accuracy on the LHT relative to control participants, for both unfamiliar and familiar face matching. Interestingly, this deficit is specific to ‘match’ trials, suggesting that people with DP may have particular difficulty in matching images of the same person that contain natural day-to-day variations in appearance. We discuss these results in the broader context of individual differences in face matching ability.

Introduction: Mapping Gwen John: Lives, Lines and Images

Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces explores issues, questions, and problems emerging in the analysis of epistolary and visual narratives. This book focuses in particular on Gwen John's letters and paintings. It offers an innovative theoretical approach to narrative analysis by drawing on Foucault's theory of power, Deleuze and Guattari's analytics of desire, and Cavarero's concept of the narratable self. Furthermore, it examines the use of letters as documents of life in narrative research and highlights the dynamics of spatiality in the constitution of the female self in art. This study brings together theoretical insights that emerge from the analysis of life documents - some of them previously unpublished - combining innovative research with specific methodological suggestions on doing narrative analysis.