Severe and selective problems with face recognition (prosopagnosia) can occur following injury to posterior cerebral areas, and are typically associated with right lateralised or bilateral lesions. Milder and/or less selective deficits have been reported following damage to either hemisphere.
We have investigated face processing in a large sample (N=65) of patients with stroke in the posterior cerebral artery (PCA) recruited based on lesion anatomy rather than symptomatology. Patient performance is compared to controls (N=48) in a case series design.
We tested different aspects of face processing using several tests and experimental paradigms: delayed matching, surprise recognition, Cambridge Face Memory Test, famous face familiarity, recognition, and naming. We also included a questionnaire about face recognition ability following stroke.
We find that deficits in face recognition may follow left and right unilateral as well as bilateral PCA-stroke. A few patients show consistent, severe deficits across face-tests, and this can occur following left, right, or bilateral stroke. No patients in our sample show consistent, severe and selective deficits in face recognition (a conservative definition of prosopagnosia). Rather, they also show deficits in object recognition and/or reading, although in some patients these additional deficits are much less severe than their problems with faces.