Compensatory strategies in processing facial emotions: evidence from prosopagnosia.

We report data on the processing of facial emotion in a prosopagnosic patient (H.J.A.). H.J.A. was relatively accurate at discriminating happy from angry upright faces, but he performed at chance when the faces were inverted. Furthermore, with upright faces there was no configural interference effec...

Disgrifiad llawn

Manylion Llyfryddiaeth
Prif Awduron: Baudouin, J, Humphreys, G
Fformat: Journal article
Iaith:English
Cyhoeddwyd: 2006
Disgrifiad
Crynodeb:We report data on the processing of facial emotion in a prosopagnosic patient (H.J.A.). H.J.A. was relatively accurate at discriminating happy from angry upright faces, but he performed at chance when the faces were inverted. Furthermore, with upright faces there was no configural interference effect on emotion judgements, when face parts expressing different emotions were aligned to express a new emergent emotion. We propose that H.J.A.'s emotion judgements relied on local rather than on configural information, and this local information was disrupted by inversion. A compensatory strategy, based on processing local face parts, can be sufficient to process at least some facial emotions.