Visual self‐face and self‐body recognition in a left‐brain‐damaged prosopagnosic patient

Abstract

The present case study describes the patient N.G., who reported prosopagnosia along with difficulty in recognising herself in the mirror following a left‐sided temporo‐occipital hemispheric stroke. The neuropsychological and experimental investigation revealed only a mild form of apperceptive prosopagnosia, without visual agnosia, primarily caused by an impaired visual processing of face‐parts and body parts but not of full faces. Emotional expressions did not modulate her face processing. On the other hand, N.G. showed a marked impairment of visual self‐recognition, as assessed with visual matching‐to‐sample tasks, both at the level of body‐part and face‐part processing and at a full‐face level, featured by a deficit in the perceptual discrimination of her own face and body, as compared to the others' face and body. N.G.'s lesion mapping showed damage to the left inferior occipito‐temporal cortex, affecting the inferior occipital gyrus and compromising long‐range connections between the occipital/temporo‐occipital areas and the anterior fronto‐temporal areas. Overall, the present case report documents that visual processing of the person's own face may be selectively compromised by a left‐sided hemispheric lesion disconnecting extra‐striate body‐ and face‐selective visual areas to self‐representation regions. Moreover, others' (full) face processing may be preserved, as compared with the impaired ability to discriminate others' body and face parts.