An exploration of ideas emanating from behavioural, developmental, neurophysiological, neuropsychological and computational approaches to the problem of visual perceptual organization. It is based on papers presented at the 31st Carnegie Symposium on Cognition, held in June 2000.

In the past 30 years, face perception has become an area of major interest within psychology. This is the most comprehensive and commanding review of the field ever published.

BORB provides a set of standardised procedures for assessing neuropsychological disorders of visual object recognition, based on tests developed in the cognitive neuropsychological literature. The tests are introduced in terms of cognitive neuropsychological analyses of object recognition, and guidance is given concerning test use and interpretation. The tests assess low-level aspects of visual perception (using same-different matching of basic perceptual features, such as orientation, length, position and object size), intermediate visual processes (e.g., matching objects different in viewpoint), access to stored perceptual knowledge about objects (object decision), access to semantic knowledge (function and associative matches) and access to names from object (picture naming). BORB will serve as an invaluable companion test battery to the PALPA test of language ability.

This book provides readers with a simplified and comprehensive account of the cognitive and neural bases of face perception in humans. Faces are ubiquitous in our environment and we rely on them during social interactions. The human face processing system allows us to extract information about the identity, gender, age, mood, race, attractiveness and approachability of other people in about a fraction of a second, just by glancing at their faces. By introducing readers to the most relevant research on face recognition, this book seeks to answer the questions: “Why are humans so fast at recognizing faces?”, “Why are humans so efficient at recognizing faces?”, “Do faces represent a particular category for the human visual system?”, What makes face perception in humans so special?, “Can our face recognition system fail”?. This book presents the author’s findings on face perception during his research studies on both normal subjects and subjects with prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces. The book describes two known forms of prosopagnosia: acquired prosopagnosia, which is the result of a brain lesion, and congenital prosopagnosia, which refers to a lifelong, developmental impairment of face recognition. Written in a comprehensive and accessible style, this book addresses both experts (cognitive scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists and computer scientists) and the general public, and aims at raising awareness for a debilitating face recognition disorder, such as prosopagnosia, which is often ignored or misdiagnosed as autism, with serious consequences for the affected persons and their families.

Lifelong prosopagnosia has emerged as a key testing ground for theories of visual system organization, as well as the development and the emergence of neural specificity in the human brain. A key open issue concerns whether individuals who have lifelong prosopagnosia also experience difficulty with recognizing non-face stimuli. This volume features a thorough review of the congenital prosopagnosia literature and critical commentaries by the leading experts in the field. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology.

The care of stroke patients has changed dramatically. As well as improvements in the emergency care of the condition, there have been marked advances in our understanding, management and rehabilitation of residual deficits. This book is about the care of stroke patients, focusing on behavioural and cognitive problems. It provides a comprehensive review of the field covering the diagnostic value of these conditions, in the acute and later phases, their requirements in terms of treatment and management and the likelihood and significance of long-term disability. This book will appeal to all clinicians involved in the care of stroke patients, as well as to neuropsychologists, other rehabilitation therapists and research scientists investigating the underlying neuroscience.

"In this book, some of the leading clinicians and cognitive neuroscientists consider the effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation. They situate the issues within an overall context that considers the different types and levels of diagnosis and assessment, the adequacy of underlying cognitive theory for rehabilitation, and more importantly, the clinical effectiveness of current treatments to improve functional recovery. By employing an evidence-based approach that critically evaluates the published literature, the book provides for a better understanding of the strengths and limitations of the cognitive approach and hopefully a more realistic expectation of its outcome for patients with neurological deficits." "The book will serve as a valuable source for a wide spectrum of professionals who deal with the neuropsychological and neurological effects of brain damage."--BOOK JACKET.

Face recognition is one of the most important abilities for everyday social interactions. Congenital prosopagnosia, also referred to as "face blindness", describes the innate, lifelong impairment to recognize other people by their face. About 2 % of the population is affected. This thesis aimed to investigate different aspects of face processing in prosopagnosia in order to gain a clearer picture and a better understanding of this heterogeneous impairment. In a first study, various aspects of face recognition and perception were investigated to allow for a better understanding of the nature of prosopagnosia. The results replicated previous findings and helped to resolve discrepancies between former studies. In addition, it was found that prosopagnosics show an irregular response behavior in tests for holistic face recognition. We propose that prosopagnosics either switch between strategies or respond randomly when performing these tests. In a second study, the general face recognition deficit observed in prosopagnosia was compared to face recognition deficits occurring when dealing with other-race faces. Most humans find it hard to recognize faces of an unfamiliar race, a phenomenon called the "other-race effect". The study served to investigate if there is a possible common mechanism underlying prosopagnosia and the other-race effect, as both are characterized by problems in recognizing faces. The results allowed to reject this hypothesis, and yielded new insights about similarities and dissimilarities between prosopagnosia and the other-race effect. In the last study, a possible treatment of prosopagnosia was investigated. This was based on a single case in which a prosopagnosic reported a sudden improvement of her face recognition abilities after she started a special diet. The different studies cover diverse aspects of prosopagnosia: the nature of prosopagnosia and measurement of its characteristics, comparison to other face recognition impairments, and treatment options. The results serve to broaden the knowledge about prosopagnosia and to gain a more detailed picture of this impairment.

This book draws together, for the first time, the latest scientific findings from leading international researchers on how face recognition develops. It is only in recent years that methods acceptable in experimental psychology have been developed for studying this vital and unique process. While other publications have concentrated on computer modeling and of face processing and the like, this one is unique in that it looks at fundamental (and so far unanswered) questions such as: What are the roots of and reasons for our ability to recognize faces? How much of this ability is learned and how much innate? By connecting studies on face processing in infancy with those on the development of face processing, it thus bridges the gap between face processing research and visual perceptual development. Leading researchers from USA and Europe who have conducted pioneering work in these domains describe results and anticipate future inquiry, covering topics such as fundamental cognitive abilities in infancy, development of face processing from infancy to adulthood, and the effects of expertise on face recognition.

This book explores visual object recognition and introduces a collaborative model, codified as the "Perceptual Expertise Network" (PEN). It focuses on delineating the principles of high-level visual learning that can account for how different object categories are processed and associated with spatially localized activity in the primate brain. It address questions such as how expertise develops, whether there are different kinds of experts, whether some disorders such as autism or prosopagnosia can be understood as a lack or loss of expertise, and how conceptual and perceptual information interact when experts recognize and categorize objects. The research and results that have been generated by these questions are presented here, along with other questions, background information, and extant issues that have emerged from recent studies.