Please cite this article in press as: Moro, V., et al. Visual body recognition in a prosopagnosic patient. Neuropsychologia (2011), doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.11.004 ARTICLE IN PRESS G Model NSY-4317; No. of Pages 14 Neuropsychologia xxx (2011) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Neuropsychologia jo u rn al hom epa ge : www.elsevier.com/locate/neuropsychologia Visual body recognition in a prosopagnosic patient V. Moro a,∗ , S. Pernigo a , R. Avesani b , C. Bulgarelli b , C. Urgesi c , M. Candidi d , S.M. Aglioti d a Department of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology, University of Verona, Lungadige Porta Vittoria 17, 37129 Verona, Italy b Dipartimento di Riabilitazione, Ospedale S. Cuore, Negrar, Verona, Italy c Dipartimento di Scienze Umane, Università di Udine and IRCCS E. Medea, Polo Friuli Venezia Giulia, San Vito al Tagliamento, Pordenone, Italy d Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università “La Sapienza” di Roma and IRCCS Fondazione S. Lucia, Roma, Italy a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 4 April 2011 Received in revised form 25 October 2011 Accepted 3 November 2011 Available online xxx Keywords: Prosopagnosia Body visual perception Body agnosia Body and face emotional expressions Fusiform face area a b s t r a c t Conspicuous deficits in face recognition characterize prosopagnosia. Information on whether agnosic deficits may extend to non-facial body parts is lacking. Here we report the neuropsychological description of FM, a patient affected by a complete deficit in face recognition in the presence of mild clinical signs of visual object agnosia. His deficit involves both overt and covert recognition of faces (i.e. recognition of familiar faces, but also categorization of faces for gender or age) as well as the visual mental imagery of faces. By means of a series of matching-to-sample tasks we investigated: (i) a possible association between prosopagnosia and disorders in visual body perception; (ii) the effect of the emotional content of stimuli on the visual discrimination of faces, bodies and objects; (iii) the existence of a dissociation between identity recognition and the emotional discrimination of faces and bodies. Our results document, for the first time, the co-occurrence of body agnosia, i.e. the visual inability to discriminate body forms and body actions, and prosopagnosia. Moreover, the results show better performance in the discrimination of emotional face and body expressions with respect to body identity and neutral actions. Since FM’s lesions involve bilateral fusiform areas, it is unlikely that the amygdala-temporal projections explain the relative sparing of emotion discrimination performance. Indeed, the emotional content of the stimuli did not improve the discrimination of their identity. The results hint at the existence of two segregated brain networks involved in identity and emotional discrimination that are at least partially shared by face and body processing. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Prosopagnosia is a relatively rare neuropsychological disorder characterized by the inability to identify human faces, including one’s own face, in terms of both configural processing and/or the processing of features. The ability to recognize faces relies on pro- cessing not only the shapes of individual features but also the relationships between them (Maurer, Le Grand, & Mondloch, 2002). Since prosopagnosic subjects can easily identify individuals on the basis of their voice or verbal descriptions, prosopagnosia cannot be considered as a general incapacity to identify people, but rather as a specific deficit regarding the visual recognition of faces. This deficit occurs despite intact intellectual and cognitive functions and comparatively preserved low-level visual processing. Prosopagnosia usually occurs following bilateral brain dam- age involving the ventral occipito-temporal cortex (Damasio, Damasio, & Von Hoesen, 1982; Rossion et al., 2003), although many prosopagnosic patients with right unilateral lesions have ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 45 8028370; fax: +39 45 8028790. E-mail address: valentina.moro@univr.it (V. Moro). been reported (Barton, Press, Keenan, & O’Connor, 2002; Busigny, Joubert, Felician, Ceccaldi, & Rossion, 2010; De Renzi, Perani, Carlesimo, Silveri, & Fazio, 1994; Uttner, Bliem, & Danek, 2002). Furthermore, developmental forms of prosopagnosia have also been described (Behrmann & Avidan, 2005; Duchaine, Yovel, Butterworth, & Nakayama, 2006). Prosopagnosia may or may not be accompanied by object recog- nition deficits; however, it is worth noting that some of the patients reported as being affected by pure prosopagnosic deficits (Bukach, Bub, Gauthier, & Tarr, 2006; Riddoch, Johnston, Bracewell, Boutsen, & Humphreys, 2008; Wada & Yamamoto, 2001) have not been tested with a degree of detail that allows excluding the presence of minor object recognition deficits (Busigny, Graf, Mayer, & Rossion, 2010). Neuroimaging studies have revealed that face perception selec- tively activates specific visual system areas including the bilateral fusiform face area (FFA) in the middle inferior temporal cortex (Kanwisher & Yovel, 2006; Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997; Sergent, Otha, & MacDonald, 1992) and the occipital face area (OFA) in the inferior lateral occipital gyrus (Gauthier et al., 2000; Peelen & Downing, 2007; Pitcher, Walsh, & Duchaine, 2011; Weiner & Grill- Spector, 2010). These regions are fundamentally involved in the 0028-3932/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.11.004