Paradoxical con®guration eects for faces and objects in prosopagnosia

Selective impairment in recognition of faces (prosopagnosia) has been advanced as an argument for a brain module dedicated to face processing and focusing on the speci®c con®gural properties of faces. Loss of the inversion e€ect supposedly strengthened the argument ([10]: de Gelder B, Bachoud-Levi AC, Degos JD. Inversion superiority in visual agnosia may be common to a variety of orientation polarised objects besides faces. Vision Research, 1998;38:2855±61; [20]: Farah MJ, Wilson K, Drain H, Tanaka J. The inverted face inversion e€ect in prosopagnosia: Evidence for mandatory, face-speci®c perceptual mechanisms. Vision Research 1995b;35:2089±93). The present study of prosopagnosic patient LH reports that he has lost the normal pattern of superior performance with upright faces and objects and shows instead paradoxical inversion e€ect for faces but also for objects. Experiment 2 investigated whether LH's use of features based route for processing upright objects would be hindered by the whole-based encoding when processing upright objects. The data show the same context e€ect for objects as was found for faces. Therefore the inversion e€ect does not present decisive evidence for the existence of a face module. Moreover, the importance of con®guration-based recognition known to be crucial for face processing, must also be taken seriously for object recognition. 7 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.