Damasio's error – Prosopagnosia with intact within‐category object recognition

The sudden inability to recognize individual faces following brain damage was first reported in a scientific journal 150 years ago and termed ‘prosopagnosia’ 70 years ago. While the term originally identified a face‐selective neurological condition, it is now obscured by a sequence of imprecisions. First, prosopagnosia is routinely used to define symptoms of individual face recognition (IFR) difficulties in the context of visual object agnosia or other neurological conditions, or even in the normal population. Second, this over‐expansive definition has lent support to a long‐standing within‐category recognition account of prosopagnosia, that is, that the impairment of IFR reflects a general impairment in recognizing within‐category objects. However, stringent experimental studies of classical cases of prosopagnosia following brain damage show that their core impairment is not in recognizing physically similar exemplars within non‐face object categories. Instead, the impairment presents specifically for recognizing exemplars of the category of faces. Moreover, compared to typical observers, the impairment appears even more severe for recognizing individual faces against physically dissimilar than similar distractors. Here, I argue that we need to limit accordingly our definition of prosopagnosia to a clinical (i.e., neurological) condition in which there is no basic‐level object recognition impairment. Other criteria for prosopagnosia are proposed, with the hope that this conservative definition enables the study of human IFR processes in isolation, and supports progress in understanding the nature of these processes.