Impaired integration of emotional faces and affective body context in a rare case of developmental visual agnosia

Abstract

In the current study we examined the recognition of facial expressions embedded in emotionally expressive bodies in case LG, an individual with a rare form of developmental visual agnosia (DVA) who suffers from severe prosopagnosia. Neuropsychological testing demonstrated that LG's agnosia is characterized by profoundly impaired visual integration. Unlike individuals with typical developmental prosopagnosia who display specific difficulties with face identity (but typically not expression) recognition, LG was also impaired at recognizing isolated facial expressions. By contrast, he successfully recognized the expressions portrayed by faceless emotional bodies handling affective paraphernalia. When presented with contextualized faces in emotional bodies his ability to detect the emotion expressed by a face did not improve even if it was embedded in an emotionally-congruent body context. Furthermore, in contrast to controls, LG displayed an abnormal pattern of contextual influence from emotionally-incongruent bodies. The results are interpreted in the context of a general integration deficit in DVA, suggesting that impaired integration may extend from the level of the face to the level of the full person.

Figure 1

Examples of baseline emotional stimuli used in the study: (A) disgust and (B) sadness faces in neutral context, (C) sadness context, (D) anger context, (E) disgust context and (F) fear context.

Figure 2

Examples of stimuli from the three levels of Perceptual Similarity between the disgust face and the face typically associated with the context. Identical disgust faces appeared in (A) disgust context (identity), (B) fear context (low similarity) (C) anger context (high similarity).

Figure 3

Recognition of isolated facial expressions in neutral context by LG and controls. Error bars represent standard error. The dashed line indicates chance level.

Figure 4

Recognition of faceless emotional scenes and body language. Error bars represent standard error. The dashed line indicates chance level.

Figure 5

Facial expression recognition as a function of context similarity for LG and controls. Error bars represent standard error. The dashed line indicates chance level.

Figure 6

Contextual bias, the percent of face categorizations which were in accordance with the body context, as a function of context similarity for LG and controls. Error bars represent standard error. The bottom dashed line indicates chance level.

Figure 7

Average dominant response categorization to facial expressions in congruent context or no context. Note that the dominant response need not be correct, only most frequent. Congruent body context is defined as the body emotion conveying the same emotion as the most face-frequent response even if erroneous.

Figure 8

Influence of contextual bodies on the recognition of facial expressions broken down by the presence of paraphernalia, face-context similarity level, and group. Positive scores reflect an increase in recognition relative to the performance with no affective context, while negative scores reflect a decrease in recognition relative to the performance with no affective context.