Prosopagnosie bei Hochbegabten

Ziel dieser Arbeit war, die Prävalenz der kongenitalen Prosopagnosie (cPA), (das Unvermögen, Gesichter wiederzuerkennen) unter Menschen mit Hochbegabung (IQ130+) im Vergleich mit Schülern und Studenten zu ermitteln. Fragebogenbasiertes Screening und diagnostisches Interview ergaben unter 194 Hochbegabten (HB) 15,5%, unter 531 Studenten 2,3% und unter 485 Schülern 1,4% cPA. In Tests aus der Autismusforschung zeigten 68% der HB mit PA und 2% der HB ohne PA Autismus-Spektrum-Merkmale (ASC). Bei 10% der Hochbegabten liegt eine Triple-Assoziation von HB, cPA und ASC vor. Vermutlich verarbeiten sie bevorzugt systematisierbare visuelle Stimuli, da sie Gesichter als Objekte im inferioren Temporalgyrus verarbeiten. Gehirnen Hochbegabter wird eine Kleine-Welt-Netzwerkarchitektur zugeschrieben mit hocheffizienter Informationsausbreitung bei minimalen Leitungskosten. Ein hoher Abstraktionsgrad visueller Informationen könnte Bedingung für die effiziente Informationsausbreitung sein.The aim of this work was to determine the prevalence of congenital prosopagnosia (cPA), (the inability to recognize faces) among people with giftedness (IQ130+) compared to high school and university students. Questionnaire-based screening and diagnostic interviewing revealed 15.5% cPA among 194 gifted people (HB), 2.3% among 531 students and 1.4% among 485 pupils. In tests from autism research, 68% of HB with PA and 52% of HB without PA showed autism spectrum traits (ASC). A triple association of HB, cPA and ASC is present in 10% of the gifted. Presumably, they prefer to process systematizable visual stimuli because they process faces as objects in the inferior temporal gyrus. Highly gifted brains are thought to have a small-world network architecture with highly efficient information propagation at minimal conduction cost. A high degree of abstraction of visual information could be a condition for efficient information propagation

Face Perception and Test Reliabilities in Congenital Prosopagnosia in Seven Tests

Congenital prosopagnosia, the innate impairment in recognizing faces, is a very heterogeneous disorder with different phenotypical manifestations. To investigate the nature of prosopagnosia in more detail, we tested 16 prosopagnosics and 21 controls with an extended test battery addressing various aspects of face recognition. Our results show that prosopagnosics exhibited significant impairments in several face recognition tasks: impaired holistic processing (they were tested amongst others with the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT)) as well as reduced processing of configural information of faces. This test battery also revealed some new findings. While controls recognized moving faces better than static faces, prosopagnosics did not exhibit this effect. Furthermore, prosopagnosics had significantly impaired gender recognition—which is shown on a groupwise level for the first time in our study. There was no difference between groups in the automatic extraction of face identity information or in object recognition as tested with the Cambridge Car Memory Test. In addition, a methodological analysis of the tests revealed reduced reliability for holistic face processing tests in prosopagnosics. To our knowledge, this is the first study to show that prosopagnosics showed a significantly reduced reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) in the CFMT compared to the controls. We suggest that compensatory strategies employed by the prosopagnosics might be the cause for the vast variety of response patterns revealed by the reduced test reliability. This finding raises the question whether classical face tests measure the same perceptual processes in controls and prosopagnosics