Rapid categorization of faces and objects in a patient with impaired object recognition.

Muriel Boucart (1) , Christine Moroni (1) , Pascal Despretz (1) , Florence Pasquier (2) , Michèle Fabre-Thorpe (3)

1 LNFP - Laboratoire de Neurosciences Fonctionnelles et Pathologies
2 Département de neurologie [Lille]
3 CERCO - Centre de recherche cerveau et cognition

We tested rapid-categorization in a patient who was impaired in face and object recognition. Photographs of natural scenes were displayed for 100 ms. Participants had to press a key when they saw an animal among various objects as distractors or human faces among animal faces as distractors. Though the patient was impaired at figure/ground segregation, recognized very few objects and faces, she categorized animals and faces with a performance ranging between 70 and 86% correct. Displaying pictures in isolation did not improve performance. The results suggest that rapid categorization can be accomplished on the basis of coarse information without overt recognition.

Mots clés: Rapid categorization; Object recognition; Face recognition; Posterior cortical atrophy; Visual agnosia; Covert recognition

Domaines: Neurosciences [q-bio.NC]

Muriel Boucart, Christine Moroni, Pascal Despretz, Florence Pasquier, Michèle Fabre-Thorpe. Rapid categorization of faces and objects in a patient with impaired object recognition.. Neurocase, 2010, pp.1-12. ⟨10.1080/13554790903339637⟩. ⟨hal-00471880⟩