Impaired perception of Mooney faces in developmental prosopagnosia

Abstract

Despite much research, the mechanisms underlying face perception deficits in developmental prosopagnosia (DP) remain unclear. Here we address this issue using Mooney faces – two-tone, ambiguous stimuli requiring holistic and top-down processing due to their minimal explicit facial cues. We conducted two experiments testing DP participants' ability to perceive faces using sensitive Mooney tasks. Experiment 1 (N = 52 DP participants) showed that perception of Mooney faces in DP is impaired. Experiment 2 (N = 64 DP participants) replicated this finding and revealed that the impairment is selective to upright faces, sparing perception of inverted faces and cars. Our results corroborate previous findings of impaired holistic processing in DP and suggest that DP deficits may involve aberrant top-down perceptual inference for faces.