Scientists in Holland recently reported the case of a 62-year-old woman known as JS. The study is published in the February issue of the journal Neurocase and describes some very unusual features of the woman's condition.
After suffering a stroke, JS reported difficulties recognising family members when they visited her in hospital. Strangely, the more familiar the person was the less able she was to identify them. For example, she immediately recognised a daughter she hadn't seen for eight years, but thought another daughter she had always been in regular contact with was a stranger. She also refused to let her grandchildren sit on her lap because she thought they looked repulsive.
Psychologists showed JS photographs of close family members, friends, celebrities and unfamiliar people. She had great difficulty recognising family and friends but no problems identifying the celebrities. She immediately recognised strangers as being unfamiliar and thought they looked normal, whereas she thought family members looked strange and distorted. Bizarrely, she also thought that pictures of Osama Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler were 'pathetic look-alikes'.
Researchers compared JS to three people without any brain injuries. They found that her recognition of family members was disproportionately impaired compared to her recognition of celebrities. The authors suggest that the problems may be related to the emotional relevance of the faces. JS had an injury to part of the brain called the superior temporal sulcus, which connects emotional processing of faces with identity processing. This may explain the greater difficulty with emotionally relevant faces, such as family, Osama Bin Laden and Hitler.
Reference
Heutink, J., Brouwer, W., Kums, E., Young, A. & Bouma, A. (2012) When family looks strange and strangers look normal: A case of impaired face perception after stroke.Neurocase: The Neural Basis of Cognition, 18 (1), 39-49.
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