Rehabilitation of face-processing skills in an adolescent with prosopagnosia: Evaluation of an online perceptual training programme.

Abstract

In this paper we describe the case of EM: a female adolescent who acquired prosopagnosia following encephalitis at the age of eight. Initial neuropsychological and eye-movement investigations indicated that EM had profound difficulties in face perception as well as face recognition. EM underwent 14 weeks of perceptual training in an online programme that attempted to improve her ability to make fine-grained discriminations between faces. Following training, EM’s face perception skills had improved, and the effect generalized to untrained faces. Eye-movement analyses also indicated that EM spent more time viewing the inner facial features post-training. Examination of EM’s face recognition skills revealed an improvement in her recognition of personally-known faces when presented in a laboratory-based test, although the same gains were not noted in her everyday experiences with these faces. In addition, EM did not improve on a test assessing the recognition of newly encoded faces. One month after training, EM had maintained the improvement on the eye-tracking test, and to a lesser extent, her performance on the familiar faces test. This pattern of findings is interpreted as promising evidence that the programme can improve face perception skills, and with some adjustments, may at least partially improve face recognition skills.