EARLY COMMITMENT OF NEURAL SUBSTRATES FOR FACE RECOGNITION

Abstract

We present evidence of a striking failure of plasticity in the neural substrates of face recognition, which suggests that the distinction between faces and other objects, and the localisation of faces relative to other objects, is fully determined prior to any postnatal experience. A boy who sustained brain damage at 1 day of age has the classic lesions and behavioural profile of adult-acquired prosopagnosia. He has profoundly impaired face recognition, whereas his recognition of objects is much less impaired. This implies that the human genome contains sufficiently explicit information about faces and nonface objects, or visual features by which they can be distinguished, that experience with these categories is not necessary for their functional delineation and differential brain localisation.