A dissociation between the sense of familiarity and access to semantic information concerning familiar people

Abstract

Functional models that describe the underlying processes involved in normal face perception and recognition postulate separate stages for the classification of a face as familiar and for the retrieval of semantic information concerning the bearer of the face. On the assumption that these stages can be selectively affected by neurological disease, the models predict the existence of brain-injured patients who may remain able to decide whether a face is familiar or not, but who cannot access person information such as occupation, etc. This possibility is investigated in a patient, ME, with a pure amnesic syndrome including severe anterograde and retrograde long-term memory loss. Performance on tasks requiring the matching of unfamiliar faces and judging the familiarity of faces or names was normal for ME, but she was very poor at giving relevant semantic information to identify faces or names she found familiar. These findings support current neuropsychological and simulation models of face processing.