Face Recognition and Awareness After Brain Injury

The view that unawareness of an impairment cannot be attributed to global changes in consciousness is strengthened by the important observation that patients with more than one deficit may be unaware of the impairment yet perfectly well aware of others.

Abstract

This chapter discusses face recognition and cognitive abilities after brain injury. Though there is evidence of sequential access within the face recognition system, other types of facial information—such as emotional expression—may be determined independently from identity. Prosopagnosia is a perception disorder in which the patient having suffered brain injury loses the ability to recognize the faces of familiar people that he or she can still recognize from nonfacial cues such as voice or name. It is inadequate to think of prosopagnosia as simply involving the loss of recognition mechanisms. A few investigations of covert recognition have been useful in confirming the occurrence of different kinds of prosopagnosia. Learning tasks are particularly useful in examining preserved covert processing at different levels of recognition. Therefore, the view that unawareness of an impairment cannot be attributed to global changes in consciousness is strengthened by the important observation that patients with more than one deficit may be unaware of the impairment yet perfectly well aware of others. There is evidence to suggest that unawareness of the impairment does not result from any general change in the patient's state of consciousness but can be specific to particular disabilities.