Developmental prosopagnosia with normal configural processing.

The configural processing hypothesis proposes that prosopagnosia results from a domain-general impairment in configural processing, and so predicted that all prosopagnosics would have impaired configural processing. In order to test this prediction, tests of face recognition and configural processing were presented to a developmental prosopagnosic. He was severely impaired in face recognition, but his normal performance on three tests of configural processing disconfirmed the configural processing hypothesis. Additional tests of low-level vision and object recognition found no evidence of impairments with material other than faces. The pattern of spared and impaired face recognition indicates that this case of developmental prosopagnosia is caused by a domain-specific inability to match novel views of faces with previously derived representations.