“
“Face recognition is an important ability of the human brain, yet its underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. Two opposite views have been proposed to account for human face recognition expertise: the ability to extract the most diagnostic local information, feature-by feature (analytical view), or the ability to process all features at once over the whole face (holistic view). To help clarifying this debate, we used an original gaze-contingent stimulus presentation method to compare normal observers and

a brain-damaged patient specifically impaired at face recognition (prosopagnosia). When a single central facial feature was revealed at a time through a gaze-contingent window, normal observers’ performance Selleckchem Talazoparib at an individual face matching task decreased Z-IETD-FMK cell line to the patient level. However, when only the central feature was masked, forcing normal observers to rely on the whole face but the fixated feature, their performance was almost not affected. In contrast, the prosopagnosic patient’s performance decreased dramatically in this latter condition. These results were independent of the absolute size of the

face and window/mask. This dissociation indicates that expertise in face recognition does not rest on the ability to analyze diagnostic local detailed features sequentially but rather on the ability to see the individual features of a face all at once, a function that is critically impaired in acquired prosopagnosia. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Congenital amusia is a disorder in the perception and production of musical pitch. It has been suggested that early exposure to a tonal language may compensate for the pitch disorder (Peretz,

2008). If so, it is reasonable to expect that there would be different characterizations of pitch perception in music and speech in congenital amusics who speak a tonal language, Hepatic fructokinase such as Mandarin. In this study, a group of 11 adults with amusia whose first language was Mandarin were tested with melodic contour and speech intonation discrimination and identification tasks. The participants with amusia were impaired in discriminating and identifying melodic contour. These abnormalities were also detected in identifying both speech and non-linguistic analogue derived patterns for the Mandarin intonation tasks. In addition, there was an overall trend for the participants with amusia to show deficits with respect to controls in the intonation discrimination tasks for both speech and non-linguistic analogues. These findings suggest that the amusics’ melodic pitch deficits may extend to the perception of speech, and could potentially result in some language deficits in those who speak a tonal language. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Research has firmly established that the integrity of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) is critical for recognition memory.