Impaired identification of faces after a left hemisphere lesion.

A 82 year-old right-handed man, without any intellectual impairment, suffered from an acute neurological deficit consisting in letter-by-letter reading, right superior quadrant hemianopia with achromatopia in the lower quadrant, and anemia. Cerebral MRI showed an infarct involving the ventral structures of the left hemisphere sparing the splenium of the corpus callosum and the thalamus. Neuropsychological examination revealed that the patient easily identified the objects, the animals and the famous places he could not name: his comments attested normal visual recognition. Conversely, when he was presented with famous faces, he always had a strong feeling of familiarity, but could not provide accurate information about the corresponding individual. Biographic information about personnalities was not impaired in the semantic-biographic store, because it could be accessed from the names. Activation of face recognition units (where the visual decription provided by the structural encoding and the stored sets of descriptions of familiar faces are compared), was effective, since the patient could distinguish famous faces from unknown ones. In a modular-sequential model of face recognition, this deficit is interpreted as a disconnection between face recognition units and person identity nodes (which are considered to contain semantic-biographic information about individuals). This kind of disturbance differs from classic prosopagnosia in which, characteristically, the patients are unable to experience a feeling of familiarity when viewing famous faces, and to perform a categorization between famous and unknown faces. Right hemisphere has a preponderant role in structural analysis of faces and in activation of face recognition units. The integrity of this hemisphere in this patient could explain the preservation of these two steps of processing. Left-hemisphere specific function in facial recognition enabled access to semantic-biographic store in a conscious, verbal and explicit way, after the right hemisphere had achieved basic visual analysis and activation of facial representation in memory. We compare the cognitive impairment in our patient to theses encountered in classical prosopagnosic patients. This case illustrates the validity of the modular-sequential model considered. In addition it throws a light on the poor-known role of the left hemisphere in face recognition.