Holistic processing of body configurations in congenital prosopagnosia

Previous studies regarding the perception of human body forms and postures have suggested that mere standing bodies are processed holistically. However, recently we also explored whether postural information is processed holistically as well. We found evidence that besides identity information, postural information is holistically processed as well. In the current study we expanded these findings to congenital prosopagnosia patients, a visual disorder depicted by weak holistic processing skills of human faces resulting in difficult recognition and discrimination of known faces. Furthermore, there is quite some overlap between human face and body areas (e.g., fusiform face area and fusiform body area), we hypothesized that if CP patients show reduced holistic body posture capabilities in comparison to healthy, age and gender matched controls, this regional overlap might also be associated to a (partial) functional overlap. The task consisted out of the complete congruency-alignment composite design a design to be a valid measure of holistic processing. In this task subjects are asked to assess whether two sequentially presented bodies are depicting the same body posture in the relevant body half (e.g., right-side of the body) regardless of the irrelevant body half (e.g., left-side of the body). Preliminary results (N = 5) show no pronounced differences between CP and matched controls. The results of this study are discussed in terms of functional plasticity and alternative processing strategies that help CP patients function in their day-to-day livesstatus: publishe