Selective attention to facial identity and facial emotion.

Patients with lesions to either the right or left hemisphere and control subjects were asked to discriminate photographs of faces and then to sort these photographs according to the identity of the face or the emotion displayed. Whether identity and emotion were correlated, independent, or constant was varied across trials. Patients with right hemisphere damage were significantly impaired at discriminating both identity and expression, and at selectively attending to either sort of facial information. However, these subjects could selectively attend to attributes of geometric figures suggesting that their impairment with faces cannot be attributed to deficits in selective attention in general.