Brain activity and face processing in acquired and developmental prosopagnosia: neuropsycological and psychophysiological markers

• Autores: Ana Sofía Urraca López
• Directores de la Tesis: Jaime Iglesias Dorado (dir. tes.), Ela Isabel Olivares Carreño (codir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid ( España ) en 2016
• Idioma: inglés
• Títulos paralelos:
  • Actividad cerebral y procesamiento de caras en la prosopagnosia adquirida y evolutiva: Marcadores neuropsicológicos y psicofisiológicos
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Fernando Carvajal Molina (presid.), Cristina Saavedra Arroyo (secret.), Isabel María Barbas Dos Santos (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Psicología Clínica y de la Salud
• Materias:
  • Ciencias médicas
    • Ciencias clínicas
      • Psicología clínica
  • Ciencias económicas
    • Economía sectorial
      • Sanidad
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: Biblos-e Archivo
• Resumen

  • This PhD thesis begins with a review of the literature regarding typical and altered face processing. First, the most relevant cognitive and neurofunctional models of spared face processing are presented. This is followed by a conceptualisation of the different etiological and functional forms within the prosopagnosia spectrum, including an analysis of the different abilities that can be compromised or spared in such variants. These can include between- and within-category discrimination, extraction of variant (emotional expression) and invariant (sex, age) information, or configural processing, in more “apperceptive” cases, where the difficulties arise at the extraction of the physical structure of the face. Affected abilities can also be familiar face recognition and naming or unfamiliar face learning, in the more “associative” variant, where a well perceived face percept fails to be linked to the structural visual representations of known faces in long-term memory and/or with the semantic information associated to the perceived face.

    Moreover, impairments may only affect faces, in more specific variants, or other non-face object categories, in more general agnosic patterns. Cognitive and neurobiological explanations of the face processing mechanisms in healthy individuals and their alterations in prosopagnosia are offered in terms of a continuum of functional impairment from an apperceptive to an associative pole. Finally, the literature on the usefulness of the psychophysiological technique of event-related potential studies in this field of research is revised, analysing its contribution to the better understanding of preserved and impaired face processing, as several authors have consistently demonstrated how different event-rerlated potentials reflect distinct face processing stages and how they are sensitive to different alterations observed in prosopagnosia.