Grant: Operating Grant

Prosopagnosia is a family of disorders in which patients lose the ability to recognize faces after some form of brain damage, such as a stroke, infection or tumour. Face recognition is a complex process involving a number of perceptual and memory functions. Likewise, the lesions that cause prosopagnosia can vary a lot, in whether the temporal lobe or occipital lobe is affected, and if the damage is in the right and/or the left side. Although it is a rare disorder, understanding the mechanisms of prosopagnosia can provide us with great insight into how the brain creates meaningful visual experiences. This is an international collaboration that brings in subjects from around the world for state-of-the-art functional and structural imaging to carefully characterize their lesions, and a thorough battery of neuropsychological and experimental tests aimed at answering key theoretical questions about what aspects of face and object processing are impaired or spared, and thus how this is related to the anatomic damage.