ESRC grant on face processing

Many studies have described a condition called 'prosopagnosia', in which individuals have specific difficulties recognising the faces of familiar people. Despite poor performance in recognition tasks using static faces, anecdotal evidence suggests that prosopagnosics can ameliorate their face recognition problems through the strategic use of “dynamic cues” (such as idiosyncratic facial movements). Further, research with normal participants demonstrates that characteristic facial gestures and expressions can prove useful for accessing identity. Taken together, these studies suggest that different mechanisms may underlie facial recognition by static versus dynamic cues.

The present study examines whether prosopagnosics can use facial motion information for recognition and matching tasks in a similar way to normal participants, despite their
impairments in static face recognition and matching. If this is the case, we would expect prosopagnosics to perform better on matching and recognition tasks that use dynamic faces, compared to static faces.

Support for this hypothesis would suggest value in therapies that help prosopagnosics to capitalise on facial motion cues. Such an approach might be usefully combined with static face therapy, to maximize prosopagnosics’ coping with face recognition problems.