All new kids on the block? Impaired holistic processing of personally familiar faces in a kindergarten teacher with acquired prosopagnosia

Acquired prosopagnosia is primarily defined as a defect in recognizing familiar faces. Nonetheless, for practical and methodological reasons, studies of such rare patients typically use pictures of unfamiliar faces. Here, we report an extensive investigation (17 behavioural tasks grouped in nine experiments) with a homogenous set of personally familiar faces in patient PS (Rossion et al., 2003 Rossion, B., Caldara, R., Seghier, M., Schuller, A.-M., Lazeyras, F., &; Mayer, E. (2003). A network of occipito-temporal face-sensitive areas besides the right middle fusiform gyrus is necessary for normal face processing. Brain, 126, 2381–2395. doi: 10.1093/brain/awg241[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. A network of occipito-temporal face-sensitive areas besides the right middle fusiform gyrus is necessary for normal face processing.), a well-documented case of acquired prosopagnosia with intact object recognition. PS’s recognition of the face pictures of 3–4-year-old children of her kindergarten is severely impaired—both in terms of accuracy and speed of recognition—and differs qualitatively from her colleagues’ performance. Relative to these typical individuals, PS relies more on external features, colour and local details of faces. She is also specifically impaired at processing the eye region in two-alternative face matching tasks, as well as in a familiar face recognition task performed both with pre-defined isolated parts and with randomly placed apertures revealing selective parts (“Bubbles”, >20.000 trials) of the personally familiar faces. These observations indicate that the same impairment observed previously with unfamiliar faces for PS and other cases of acquired prosopagnosia is associated with a deficient long-term representation of the eye region. Various manipulations that differentially affect the processing of the eye region suggest that this impairment is a consequence of the inability to represent the multiple parts of the eye region, and of the whole familiar face, as a single unit. This impairment in holistic processing is further evidenced here across different paradigms with composite faces, wholes and parts, and configurally distorted faces, mirroring and strengthening previous observations made with unfamiliar faces in PS and other cases of acquired prosopagnosia. Altogether, these observations suggest that prosopagnosia following brain damage affects unfamiliar and familiar face processing in a qualitatively similar way.     

The Self in Movement: Being Identified and Identifying Oneself in the Process of Migration and Asylum Seeking

How migration influences the processes of identity development has been under longstanding scrutiny in the social sciences. Usually, stage models have been suggested, and different strategies for acculturation (e.g., integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization) have been considered as ways to make sense of the psychological transformations of migrants as a group. On an individual level, however, identity development is a more complex endeavor: Identity does not just develop by itself, but is constructed as an ongoing process. To capture these processes, we will look at different aspects of migration and asylum seeking; for example, the cultural-specific values and expectations of the hosting (European) countries (e.g., as identifier), but also of the arriving individuals/groups (e.g., identified as refugees). Since the two may contradict each other, negotiations between identities claims and identity assignments become necessary. Ways to solve these contradictions are discussed, with a special focus on the experienced (and often missing) agency in different settings upon arrival in a new country. In addition, it will be shown how sudden events (e.g., 9/11, the Charlie Hebdo attack) may challenge identity processes in different ways.     

Late‐ but not early‐onset blindness impairs the development of audio‐haptic multisensory integration

Integrating different senses to reduce sensory uncertainty and increase perceptual precision can have an important compensatory function for individuals with visual impairment and blindness. However, how visual impairment and blindness impact the development of optimal multisensory integration in the remaining senses is currently unknown. Here we first examined how audio‐haptic integration develops and changes across the life span in 92 sighted (blindfolded) individuals between 7 and 70 years of age. We used a child‐friendly task in which participants had to discriminate different object sizes by touching them and/or listening to them. We assessed whether audio‐haptic performance resulted in a reduction of perceptual uncertainty compared to auditory‐only and haptic‐only performance as predicted by maximum‐likelihood estimation model. We then compared how this ability develops in 28 children and adults with different levels of visual experience, focussing on low‐vision individuals and blind individuals that lost their sight at different ages during development. Our results show that in sighted individuals, adult‐like audio‐haptic integration develops around 13–15 years of age, and remains stable until late adulthood. While early‐blind individuals, even at the youngest ages, integrate audio‐haptic information in an optimal fashion, late‐blind individuals do not. Optimal integration in low‐vision individuals follows a similar developmental trajectory as that of sighted individuals. These findings demonstrate that visual experience is not necessary for optimal audio‐haptic integration to emerge, but that consistency of sensory information across development is key for the functional outcome of optimal multisensory integration.     

Optimizing preoperative expectations in cardiac surgery patients is moderated by level of disability: the successful development of a brief psychological intervention

Patients’ expectations have shown to be a major psychological predictor of health outcome in cardiac surgery patients. However, it is unclear whether patients’ expectations can be optimized prior to surgery. This study evaluates the development of a brief psychological intervention focusing on the optimization of expectations and its effect on change in patients’ expectations prior to cardiac surgery. Ninety patients scheduled for coronary artery bypass graft were randomly assigned to (1) standard medical care, (2) additional expectation manipulation intervention (EMI), and (3) additional attention control group. Therapists’ fidelity to intervention manuals and patients satisfaction with the intervention were assessed for both active intervention conditions. Patients’ expectations about post-surgical disability, treatment control, personal control, and disease duration were assessed before and after the psychological intervention. Demographical, medical, and psychosocial characteristics and disability were assessed at baseline. Treatment fidelity and patient satisfaction was very high in both intervention conditions. Only patients receiving EMI developed higher personal control expectations and longer (more realistic) expectations of disease duration. The effect of intervention group on patients’ disability expectations and patients’ personal control expectations was moderated by patient’s level of disability. EMI patients with low to moderate disability developed positive expectations whereas patients with high disability did not. This study shows the successful development of a short psychological intervention that was able to modify patients’ expectations, especially in those with low to moderate disability. Given the robust association of expectations and surgery outcome, such an intervention might offer the opportunity to enhance patients’ health following cardiac surgery.     

Reduced fixation on the upper area of personally familiar faces following acquired prosopagnosia

Selective impairment of face recognition following brain damage, as in acquired prosopagnosia, may cause a dramatic loss of diagnosticity of the eye area of the face and an increased reliance on the mouth for identification ( Caldara et al., 2005 ). To clarify the nature of this phenomenon, we measured eye fixation patterns in a case of pure prosopagnosia (PS, Rossion et al., 2003 ) during her identification of photographs of personally familiar faces (27 children of her kindergarten). Her age‐matched colleague served as a control. Consistent with previous evidence, the normal control identified the faces within two fixations located just below the eyes (central upper nose). This pattern (location and duration) of fixations remained unchanged even by increasing difficulty by presenting anti‐caricatures of the faces. In contrast, the great majority of the patient's fixations, irrespective of her accuracy, were located on the mouth. Overall, these observations confirm the abnormally reduced processing of the upper area of the face in acquired prosopagnosia. Most importantly, the prosopagnosic patient also fixated the area of the eyes spontaneously in between the first and last fixation, ruling out alternative accounts of her behaviour such as, for example, avoidance or failure to orient attention to the eyes, as observed in autistic or bilateral amygdala patients. Rather, they reinforce our proposal of a high‐level perceptual account ( Caldara et al., 2005 ), according to which acquired prosopagnosic patients have lost the ability to represent multiple elements of an individual face as a perceptual unit (holistic face perception). To identify a given face, they focus very precisely on local features rather than seeing the whole of a face from its diagnostic centre (i.e. just below the eyes). The upper area of the face is particularly less attended to and less relevant for the prosopagnosic patient because it contains multiple features that require normal holistic perception in order to be the most diagnostic region. Consequently, prosopagnosic patients develop a more robust representation of the mouth, a relatively isolated feature in the face that may contain more information than any single element of the upper face area, and is thus sampled repeatedly for resolving ambiguity in the process of identification.     

Relationship between object-related gestures and the fractionated object knowledge system

The praxic semantic system comprises a conceptual knowledge system, which stores functional information about objects, and an action knowledge system, which stores information about the correct manipulation of objects. Moreover, mechanical problem solving abilities permit to take advantages from objects structure to use unfamiliar tools or discover alternative ways of using familiar tools. This study aims at investigating whether conceptual knowledge, action knowledge and mechanical problem solving abilities intervene in the production of gestures with objects (i.e. pantomimes and object use) by testing a group of brain damaged patients. Results showed that the mechanical problem solving abilities are not sufficient to produce pantomimes and that only severe deficits in the praxic semantic system would affect the production of these gestures. Furthermore, a double dissociation was observed between mechanical problem solving abilities and the capacity to use multiple objects. Overall, the results indicate that the praxic semantic system can be disrupted at different levels, suggesting that the semantic system for object has to be conceived as fractionated in different entities.     

Five types of personality continuity in childhood and adolescence

This study examines 5 types of personality continuity--structural, mean-level, individual-level, differential, and ipsative--in a representative population (N=498) and a twin and sibling sample (N=548) of children and adolescents. Parents described their children on 2 successive occasions with a 36-month interval using the Hierarchical Personality Inventory for Children (I. Mervielde & F. De Fruyt, 1999). There was evidence for structural continuity in the 2 samples, and personality was shown to be largely differentially stable. A large percentage had a stable trait profile indicative of ipsative stability, and mean-level personality changes were generally small in magnitude. Continuity findings were explained mainly by genetic and nonshared environmental factors.     

Literatur in Examensarbeiten

After the Second World War up to the 1980s Harald Schultz-Hencke’s so-called German neopsychoanalysis was an important theoretical reference for psychoanalysts in the German Psychoanalytical Society (DPG). Simultaneously, however, references were increasingly being made to quintessential psychoanalytical sources which of course had an impact on the psychoanalytical training. The references in final papers of a DPG psychoanalytical institute from 1971–2008 were compared to the references in clinical papers of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. It can be shown that the influence of German neopsychoanalysis in the final theses of the psychoanalytical institute in question has diminished since the 1990s and has become irrelevant in the twenty-first century.