Current Issues on Prosopagnosia

Abstract

There is a tendency in the literature to treat prosopagnosia as if it were a single disorder, dependent on the disruption of a unique mechanism and associated with a stereotyped lesional picture. The search for a common interpretation has from time to time privileged different aspects of the disorder, but the failure to reach a general consensus insinuates that an analytical approach, aiming at distinguishing, rather than unifying the manifestations of prosopagnosia, may be more fruitful. After all, nobody would conceive of aphasia as a single deficit and even for visual agnosia at least two forms have been envisaged.