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Abstract:
Congenital prosopagnosia, the innate impairment in recognizing faces exhibits diverse deficits. Due to this heterogeneity the possible existence of subgroups of the impairment was suggested (eg Kress and Daum, 2003 Behavioural Neurology14109-21). We examined 23 congenital prosopagnosics (cPAs) identified via a screening questionnaire (as used in Stollhoff, Jost, Elze, and Kennerknecht, 2011 PLoS ONE6e15702) and 23 age-, gender and educationally matched controls with a battery consisting of nine different tests. These included well known tests like the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT, Duchaine and Nakayama, 2006 Neuropsychologia44576-85), a Famous Face Test (FFT), and new, own tests about object and face recognition. As expected, cPAs had lower CFMT and FFT scores than the controls. Analyses of the performance patterns across the nine tests suggest the existence of subgroups within both cPAs and controls. These groups could not be revealed only based on the CFMT and FFT scores, indicating the necessity of tests addressing different, specific aspects of object and face perception for the identification of subgroups. Current work focuses on characterizing the subgroups and identifying the most useful tests.