DOI: 10.1093/brain/awg086

Brain (2003), 126, 889±907

Hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces after left
lateral temporo-occipital venous infarction: a
double dissociation with prosopagnosia
Patrik Vuilleumier,1,3 Christine Mohr,2 Nathalie Valenza,3 Corinne Wetzel2,3 and Theodor Landis3
London, UK, 2Department of Rehabilitation, University
Hospital of Geneva and 3Department of Neurology,
University Hospital of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

Summary

Right hemisphere dominance in face processing is well
established and unilateral right inferior temporo-occipital damage can result in prosopagnosia. Here, we describe a 21-year-old right-handed woman with acute
impairment in face recognition that selectively concerned unfamiliar faces, following a focal left lateral
temporo-occipital venous infarct. She was severely
impaired in discerning that unknown people seen in
everyday life were unfamiliar, although she had no dif®culty recognizing familiar people. Thus, she had no
prosopagnosia, but abnormal `hyperfamiliarity' for
unknown faces. Her dif®culty was not accompanied by
delusions or de®cits in discrimination, identi®cation or
memory for faces. Standard neuropsychological testing
showed that her recognition of familiar faces was
entirely normal. By contrast, her sense of personally
knowing faces was severely impaired when unknown
faces evoked weak signals of familiarity based on spurious cues, to the extent that she would misattribute fame
to faces that were unknown but to which she had been

Correspondence to: Dr P. Vuilleumier, MD, Laboratory for
Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, Departments of
Clinical Neuroscience and Physiology, University Medical
Center, 1 rue Michel-Servet, Geneva, Switzerland
E-mail: patrik.vuilleumier@medecine.unige.ch

incidentally exposed on a prior occasion. Priming
experiments also revealed that, unlike normal subjects,
she made familiarity judgements without accessing
semantic identity representations. Moreover, in face
recognition tests, she generally showed bias in that she
relied more on right-hemisphere strategies to identify
global traits and less on left-hemisphere processes compared with healthy subjects. This case provides novel
evidence for a differential contribution of the two hemispheres to face recognition. Hyperfamiliarity for
unknown faces might arise from an imbalance between
reciprocal hemispheric functions in face recognition,
with relative hypoactivation of left hemisphere processes but hyperactivation of right-hemisphere processes
for retrieving stored associations about people, linking
seen faces to representations of affective and personal
relevance. Hence, abnormal bias in attributing some
personal meaning to unknown faces could be evoked by
spurious signals of familiarity based on irrelevant affective associations in the right hemisphere.

Keywords: face recognition; familiarity; prosopagnosia; misidenti®cation; hemispheric laterality

Introduction

Different disorders of face recognition may follow brain
damage. Prosopagnosia, although rare, is the best-known
syndrome, and is de®ned as the inability to recognize familiar
persons by their face alone (Bodamer, 1947; Damasio et al.,
1982; GruÈsser and Landis, 1991). Different forms have been
distinguished on the basis of performance in visual tests
(Bruyer and Schweich, 1991; GruÈsser and Landis, 1991;
McNeil and Warrington, 1991), such as apperceptive cases
thought to suffer from a perceptual de®cit in encoding facial
traits, and associative cases thought to suffer from the
destruction of stored representations of known faces or a
Brain 126(4) ã Guarantors of Brain 2003; all rights reserved

de®cit in accessing these representations (Bruce and Young,
1986; Burton et al., 1990). Remarkably, some patients with
associative prosopagnosia may show evidence of implicit
visual recognition of known faces, despite a complete lack of
familiarity with such faces (Bauer, 1984). This suggests that
the subjective experience of recognizing a face may involve
not only adequate perceptual processing and activation of
internal representations of face traits, but access to more
complex associations stored in memory that pertain to the
identity of a known person (Damasio et al., 1990; Schreiber
et al., 1991). Accordingly, the perception of a familiar face

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1Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College

890

P. Vuilleumier et al.

Table 1 General neuropsychological assessment
Test

Visual object recognition
Poppelreuter overlapping shapes
Montreal±Toulouse Agnosia Test
Object parts
Colour test
Executive functions
Verbal letter ¯uency (2 min)
Verbal category ¯uency (2 min)
Visual design ¯uency (3 min)
Trail Making Test A
Trail Making Test B
Luria graphic sequences
Luria gesture sequences
Colour-Word Stroop
D2 Test of sustained attention
Correct targets cancelled
Errors
Memory
Digit verbal span
Corsi visuospatial span
Rey word list learning
Immediate recall 1
Immediate recall 2
Immediate recall 3
Immediate recall 4
Immediate recall 5
Delayed recall
Delayed recognition
Rey visual shape learning
Immediate recall 1
Immediate recall 2
Immediate recall 3
Immediate recall 4
Immediate recall 5
Delayed recall
Delayed recognition

Maximum or
minimum score

*

31
43
89
198
12
4
4

/44**
/44
/90
/200
/12
/4
/4

Centile 10±50

8
8
8
6

/8
/8
/8
/6

20
Right hand, 15
Left hand, 15

/20
/15
/15

5
20
20
18

/5
/20
/20
/18

32
39
32
25 s
77 s
15
5
48

Min. = 25
Min. = 27
Min. = 27
Max. = 34
Max. = 85
/15
/5
/49

404
4

/700

5
7

**

12
14
15
15
15
14
15

/15
/15
/15
/15
/15
/15
/15

5
7
13
13
15
15
15

/15
/15
/15
/15
/15
/15
/15

Centile 10

*Norms are based on the Standardized Geneva Hospital Neuropsychology Battery (unpublished) or
published data (Spreen and Strauss, 1991; Benton et al., 1994). Abnormal performance in patient J. R. is
indicated by ** (centile 10); otherwise, performance was within the normal range (centile 50).

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Language
Object naming
Boston Naming 1
Boston Naming 2
ExaDE Bachy±Langedock test
Word reading
Oral spelling
Writing
Calculation
Ideomotor and constructional praxis
Right hand
Left hand
Orofacial
Drawing
Body schema
Culver right±left orientation test
Benton ®nger agnosia test

Patient J. R.

Hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces

such disorders is that they involve a disturbance in the
activation of affective and semantic associations about known
people, triggered by inappropriate faces and/or other irrelevant cues (Ellis and Young, 1990). Thus, subjective appraisal
of familiarity is speci®cally altered but identi®cation of
known faces can be preserved (Ellis and Young, 1990; Sno
and Linszen, 1990), although memory and perceptual
processing of faces are often reported to be also impaired
(Young et al., 1990). A wide variety of lesions has been
reported in such patients, including unilateral right (Young
et al., 1990), bilateral (Burgess et al., 1996) and diffuse
(FoÈrstl et al., 1991) cerebral damage.
Unlike these cases, our patient had a very focal cortical
lesion and she showed no delusion and no de®cit in face
perception or face memory, even during the acute post-onset
stage. Detailed neuropsychological tests were conducted to
document her performance at various levels in the face
recognition system and to investigate the possible factors
associated with her hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces.

Case history

J. R. was a 21-year-old right-handed (Old®eld's laterality
index 100%) female student without previous neurological or
psychiatric history. She was born in Switzerland and spent her
childhood in Geneva. Following normal education in primary
school, she obtained her high school diploma and started
studying the history of art and linguistics at university. She
was very keen on theatre plays and artistic paintings. She had
never experienced any dif®culty in person recognition or
memory in the past.
J. R. was admitted to hospital because of sudden
headaches, nausea and a generalized tonic±clonic seizure.
She had no neurological de®cit, in particular no visual ®eld
defect, and no language disturbance. Detailed neuropsychological assessment was performed in the ®rst and third weeks
after onset. There was only mild word-®nding dif®culty in the
®rst testing session that resolved on the second session, and
slightly impaired short-term verbal memory (Table 1). Verbal
and visual learning, frontal executive and basic visuoperceptive functions were intact. Brain CT revealed a haemorrhagic
infarct in the left lateral temporo-occipital region in the
territory of the vein of LabbeÂ, caused by thrombosis of the left
transverse and sigmoid venous sinuses, and it was con®rmed
by conventional arteriography and MRI (Fig. 1). There was
no other brain lesion. A hereditary defect in antithrombin III
was diagnosed. After local intravenous thrombolysis, oral
warfarin and phenytoin were started; the medical course was
favourable, with partial sinus recanalization on magnetic
resonance angiography 10 days later. EEG showed slow
waves and occasional sharp waves in the left posterior regions
during the ®rst week, with rapid improvement and only
moderate slowing during the second week. Repeated EEGs
were normal afterwards.
In hospital, J. R. had no dif®culty recognizing known
people and learning new faces but spontaneously complained

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generally triggers the activation of a rich assemblage of
information concerning unique biographical details, past
contextual episodes, affective relevance, and so on, which all
participate in the subjective recollective experience associated with face recognition (Damasio et al., 1990; Van
Lancker, 1991). However, such associative components of
face recognition, beyond purely visual perceptual processing,
remain largely unknown.
While prosopagnosia is most often associated with bilateral
ischaemic lesions in the territory of the posterior cerebral
arteries, unilateral damage to the inferior temporo-occipital
cortex (areas 20, 21 and 37) in the right hemisphere appears
suf®cient to cause associative prosopagnosia, with complete
loss of familiarity for known faces despite relatively intact
perception and discrimination abilities (Landis et al., 1986,
1988; De Renzi et al., 1994). However, some authors have
suggested that bilateral damage may be mandatory (Damasio
et al., 1982) or lead to more profound de®cits (Rhodes, 1985).
It remains uncertain (i) whether right hemisphere function is
crucial for recognizing familiarity, besides its superior role in
visual facial analysis; and (ii) whether the left hemisphere
makes any useful contribution to face recognition in humans.
No case of prosopagnosia or any other selective disorder of
face recognition subsequent to a unilateral left hemisphere
lesion in a right-handed subject has yet been reported.
Here we report a young woman who presented with a
peculiar disorder of face recognition following a lesion
restricted to the lateral temporo-occipital junction of the left
hemisphere due to a venous infarction. The patient exhibited
a selective de®cit in judging the familiarity of unknown faces,
but she had no dif®culty discriminating and recognizing
known faces, and showed no delusion, confabulation or any
other general cognitive impairment. Such a de®cit has not
been described previously as an isolated disturbance, and
constitutes double dissociation with respect to defective
recognition of familiarity for known faces in associative
prosopagnosia. This patient provides unique insights into the
left hemisphere's contribution to face processing and the data
suggest a reciprocal function of the two hemispheres in
associative recognition processes that bestow an experience
of personal familiarity on seen faces. It also exempli®es the
unique value of lesions situated outside common vascular
territories in revealing novel brain±behaviour relationships,
as historically shown for other rare de®cits due to tumours
(Trescher and Ford, 1937) or venous infarctions (Zihl et al.,
1983).
The false familiarity with faces presented by our patient
was very different from disorders of familiarity associated
with delusional misidenti®cations, such as Capgras syndrome, in which the patient believes that a familiar person has
been replaced by a disguised impostor, or FreÂgoli syndrome,
in which the patient believes that a known person has
disguised himself as another person (Ellis and Young, 1990;
Young et al., 1990). These psychiatric disorders may
occasionally follow brain damage (Young et al., 1990;
Signer, 1994). It has been suggested that a critical aspect of

891

892

P. Vuilleumier et al.

about continuously experiencing erroneous familiarity for
unknown people's faces. Her errors concerned other patients,
visitors and hospital staff, and greatly embarrassed her. She
often engaged in effortful memory searching to decide that
she was mistaken, or had to ask the person whether they knew
each other. Such errors were very frequent during the ®rst
3 weeks (almost all encounters during the ®rst week and more
than half of new encounters up to 3 weeks, according to the
patient) then gradually decreased. These errors were still
frequent during the time of our investigations, and persisted
to a lesser degree after more than 1 year of follow-up. Initially
every person who entered her hospital room was familiar to
her, she thought she knew him or her, and she would smile at
him or her, expecting the person to sit next to her bed and chat
with her. It was quite frightening to her that many visitors did
not notice her and continued towards her roommate, an
elderly woman she knew she had never met. At these
moments she tried to ®gure out where she knew these people
from, and would engage in lengthy memory searches. Was it
the father of a school friend she had met once? A person seen
in the news? A writer seen in a newspaper? A man met at a

recent party? She rapidly became suspicious about her own
perception of intimate familiarity with these people, but was
still often initially convinced that she knew a face at ®rst sight
despite clear evidence to the contrary. On questioning, she
admitted that during the ®rst 48 h she might also have
experienced on a few occasions a similar feeling that the
voices of these unknown persons sounded familiar. However,
this feeling of false voice familiarity was much weaker than
that of face familiarity; it was always accompanied by
simultaneous false familiarity for the face and then faded
rapidly. She never experienced any dif®culty recognizing
voices on the telephone or radio.
During the ®rst grand round on the ward (4 days after
admission), J. R. greeted one of the authors (T. L.) by using
the familiar form of personal pronoun (tu, unusual in French
with an unknown physician), smiling at him as if he was
somebody known to her, though she could not retrieve his
name right away. Realizing her mistake, she excused herself
and said: `Sorry, you must be the professor, it got me again, I
cannot trust my own perceptions. When you entered this door
I thought I knew you well, well enough so that you would

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Fig. 1 Brain MRI of the patient 10 days after stroke (A±D) and 1 year later (E±F). (A) T2-weighted coronal and (B) T1-weighted sagittal
images showing haemorrhagic infarction in the posterior middle and inferior temporal gyri of the left hemisphere, close to the temporooccipital junction, and in the paraventricular occipital white matter. (C, D) Corresponding anatomical templates using the method of
Damasio and Damasio (1989). The acute lesion was centred on Brodmann areas 37, 21 and 20. (E) In the chronic stage, T1-weighted
coronal images show a focal cystic lesion in the same area. (F) Corresponding anatomical templates, showing that persistent damage is
centred on the middle temporal gyrus.

Hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces

893

Table 2 General face perception abilities
Controls: cut-off (mean
6 SD)

49/54
6 : 45

39 (45.4 63.9)
8 : 00 (5 : 33 6 74 s)

29/30
30/30
24/24
9/9
10/10
12/12
20/20
30/30
12/12

24 (24.0)
9 (9.0)
10 (10.0)
12 (12.0)
18 (19.6)
26 (29.1)
11 (11.7)

43/48
23/24
20/24

39 (46.2)
NA
NA

23/24
20/24
23/24
42/42
18/24
19/24

15 (20.5)
19 (23.0)
40 (40.3 6 0.8)
9 (12.5 6 3.2)
19 (20.8 61.5)

100/110
1/50
564 ms

97 (101 6 4.0)
3 (2.0 61.0)
604 (6 225) ms

In all tests, the patient's performance was compared with that of normal subjects of similar age and
education level, as available from published norms (Bruyer and Schweich, 1991; Benton et al., 1994) or
from our own data.

embrace me and call me by my ®rst name. Apparently we do
not know each other, but I still have that feeling of having met
you many times'. She also explained: `My eyes are caught by
someone's face; I have the strong feeling of knowing him or
her without being able to place him or her ¼ I have the
feeling we have met in some place or talked together, but I
cannot ®gure out where or when, or what we talked about.
This happened to me occasionally before, as to everyone I
suppose, but now it is present all the time and with everybody.
This occurred with many nurses, I often asked them if we
were together at school, or if we were living in the same
neighbourhood. Also, I thought I had already met with some
of the doctors, long before my illness, yet I don't know when'.
By contrast, correct recognition was con®dent and associated with immediate retrieval of a speci®c identity. `When I
truly recognize someone, I have no doubt: I just know who the
person is. It is more automatic, more natural. When I am not
sure, I give a smile or say hello, I wait and see'.
In the initial phase of her illness she said that the inability
to recognize unfamiliarity was practically ubiquitous, concerned most newly encountered people, and was independent

of the surroundings within the hospital, whereas her ability to
recognize truly familiar persons was never impaired.
However, after discharge a few weeks later, it appeared that
her errors with unfamiliar faces were in¯uenced by the
situational context. Familiarity errors were less common
when she was walking in the street or using public transport,
but increased speci®cally when she was on the university
campus, in her neighbourhood or visiting the hospital during
follow-up. J. R. never misidenti®ed a person for another and
never thought people were disguised. Her familiarity errors
with unknown faces were quite dramatic during the ®rst
2 weeks and then decreased gradually over a period of
months, but were still present after 1 year of follow-up (10%
of new faces, in the patient's estimation). Subsequent MRI
scans 6 and 12 months after onset showed considerable
shrinking of the lesion, with a chronic infarct centred on the
posterior middle temporal gyrus (Fig. 1E and F).
In summary, this striking disturbance in which unknown
faces are appraised as familiarity from unknown faces
constitutes a novel clinical phenomenon, hitherto never
reported, caused by an unusual lesion outside the common

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Benton matching test (Benton et al., 1994)
Total correct
Total time (min : s)
Mooney face closure test (Lansdell, 1968)
Male/female discrimination
Young/old discrimination
Bruyer and Schweich battery
(Bruyer and Schweich, 1991) subtests
1. Face/non-face decision
2. Matching isolated facial features
3. Matching identity across different view
4. Matching across different expressions
5. Gender classi®cation
6. Age classi®cation
7. Recognition of facial expressions
8. Familiarity decision
Total correct
Famous faces correctly recognized
Unknown faces correctly rejected
9. Recognition of famous faces
Semantic information
Naming: spontaneous
Naming: cued
Eye-gaze direction (Campbell et al., 1990)
Recognition of caricatures
Disguise Task (Young et al., 1990)
Actors Task
Total correct
False alarms on distractors
Mean reaction time (correct responses)

Patient J. R.: raw score

894

P. Vuilleumier et al.
Table 3 General memory abilities
Controls: cut-off
(mean 6 SD)

34/40
4/60
30
4.19
0.43

(34.3 6 5.1)
(3.1 6 2.8)
22 (31.1 6 5.5)
(2.8 6 0.6)
(0.31 6 0.2)

35/40
0/60
35
6.66
1.47

(37.8 6 2.8)
(0.8 6 0.8)
28 (37.0 6 2.9)
(3.7 6 0.4)
(0.34 6 0.32)

30/36; percentile 60
24/24; percentile >99
16/24; percentile 10

18 (28)
14 (19)
15 (19)

87/115
43
16
28
44
42
41

80 (99)
39 (43)
20 (25)
26 (30)
NA; max. 45
NA; max. 45
NA; max. 45

In all tests, the patient's performance was compared with that of normal subjects of similar age and
education level, as available from published norms (Baddeley et al., 1994; Bindschaedler et al., 1995) or
our own data.

arterial territories involved in ischaemic strokes. It provides a
unique piece of evidence for an important function of the left
cerebral hemisphere in the recognition of faces and in
mechanisms of familiarity. Below, we report our examination
of various aspects of face processing in J. R. using a large
battery of standard tasks that are commonly used in
prosopagnosia, and a number of ad hoc experiments.

General face processing and memory abilities

All the following experiments were performed during the
third week after stroke to test for the presence of
prosopagnosia, i.e. an impairment in the ability to discriminate and remember familiar faces. Several standardized tests
were given to probe (i) basic face perception abilities
(Table 2) and (ii) general memory abilities for faces, people
and other complex visual material (Table 3). As indicated in
Table 2, testing for general face perception abilities comprised a battery of nine subtests assessing separate recognition processes, including a familiarity decision task that
required classi®cation of a series of faces as famous or
unknown [the Bruyer and Schweich battery (Bruyer and
Schweich, 1991)], a test of con®gurational facial organization
(Lansdell, 1968), the discrimination of individual faces in

different views (Benton et al., 1994), and the perception of
gaze direction (Campbell et al., 1990).
A few other special tests assessed the identi®cation of faces
with an unusual appearance. Recognition of caricatures (e.g.
of politicians) was examined because it has been suggested
that memory representations of familiar faces may exaggerate
distinctive physiognomic features, as do caricatures (Rhodes
et al., 1987), and a defect in extracting such distinctive
features might conceivably induce abnormal familiarity with
unknown people. Also, we used a disguise task (Young et al.,
1990) that required matching unfamiliar faces masked by
various disguises (e.g. glasses or a false beard), and a similar
task, the Actor Task, that required recognition of famous
actors in different roles (e.g. with different make-up or age).
Patients with delusional misidenti®cation are particularly
impaired on such tasks, whereas they have no dif®culty
recognizing undisguised faces (Young et al., 1990).
General memory abilities were assessed with a recognition
memory test for faces and words (Bindschaedler et al., 1996),
the Doors and People Test (Baddeley et al., 1994), and
structured questionnaires assessing semantic knowledge
about familiar people and celebrities (Ellis et al., 1989;
Kapur et al., 1992), adapted and standardized for the Swiss
population (Bindschaedler et al., 1995).

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Recognition memory test (Bindschaedler et al., 1996)
1. Faces
Hits (H)
False alarms (FA)
Total correct (H ± FA)
Discrimination (d¢)
Response bias (C)
2. Words
Hits (H)
False alarms (FA)
Total correct (H ± FA)
Discrimination (d¢)
Response bias (C)
Doors and People Test (Baddeley et al., 1994)
People
Doors
Names
Semantic knowledge of people (Kapur et al., 1992;
Bindschaedler et al., 1995)
Dead±Alive People test: total score
1. Dead/alive decision
2. Date of death
3. Mode of death
4. Profession
5. Achievement
6. Nationality

Patient J. R.: raw score

Hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces

Results

Global and featural visual processing of faces

Several additional tests were designed to examine face
recognition beyond the basic perceptual stages. All these tests
were administered between the fourth and eighth weeks after
onset. During this period, the patient was still making
frequent familiarity errors with unknown faces in everyday
life, and control MRI scans demonstrated that a chronic lesion
restricted to the middle temporal gyrus persisted up to 1 year
after onset (Fig. 1E and F).
The following experiments probed speci®cally for an
impairment in encoding local compared with global traits in
faces. It is known that the left hemisphere is preferentially
involved in parsing local features, while the right hemisphere
is more concerned with global con®gurational traits (e.g.
Hillger and Koenig, 1991; Tanaka and Farah, 1993; Rossion
et al., 2000). As shown by Yarbus (1967), visual exploration
of faces is driven strongly by internal parts, such as the eyes,
nose and mouth. These internal parts are more important than
external features or whole contours in the recognition of
known faces, whereas both internal and external features are

equally important for unfamiliar faces (Ellis et al., 1979;
Young et al., 1985b). Left hemisphere damage might have
disrupted the processing of local features, leading to false
recognition based on the predominance of right-hemispheric
processing of global or external traits. The three tasks
described below (Inverted Face, Face Parts, and Altered Face)
were used to compare the roles of parts and wholes in face
recognition and familiarity judgements.
Whenever possible, performance was measured not only
by accuracy and error rates, but also by signal detection
measures of discrimination and response bias. Indeed, J. R.'s
problem involved a false feeling of familiarity for persons
without real personal meaning, i.e. she made false alarms and
accepted new faces as already known, but did not fail to
recognize previously known or famous faces (i.e. she was not
prosopagnosic). Signal detection measures allowed us to take
the whole of her decision behaviour into account, by
calculating d¢ values for her visual discrimination sensitivity
and C values for her personal response criteria strategy
(Green and Swets, 1966). At a d¢ value of zero it can be
assumed that the observer cannot distinguish between a signal
and background noise. Increasing d¢ values indicate that the
signal is more salient and more easily recognized. On the
other hand, a low C value indicates that the observer accepts
less salient signals as possible hits, and thus makes errors but
also achieves a high rate of correct answers. High C values
indicate a more strict decision threshold, with fewer mistakes
but also a lower hit rate. To compare J. R. with normal
subjects, we calculated the con®dence intervals for d¢ and C
values from the means and standard deviations obtained for
the normal subjects. As in the method of Hirsig (1998), we
used t values instead of Z values because of the small control
sample (e.g. six or eight subjects). Values of t corresponding
to the appropriate number of degrees of freedom (d.f.) were
taken from tables provided by Hirsig (1998), with the 95%
level set at t = 2.57 for six subjects and t = 2.37 for eight
subjects. We calculated ®rst the estimated standard deviation
(s = s/Öd.f., where s is the standard deviation of the control
sample), and then the con®dence interval for the mean (CI = m
6 t95% 3 s, where m is the mean value of the control sample).
This con®dence interval is the range of values within which
95% of the general population would be likely to lie, given
the sample. We assumed that the performance of our patient
was abnormal if it was outside this interval.

Inverted face task

This test compared recognition of upright and upside-down
faces. Extraction of salient local features is more important
for upside-down than for upright presentation (Yin, 1969).
Inversion can remove the right hemisphere superiority
normally found with upright faces (Hillger and Koenig,
1991). Thus, defective encoding of local features should
disturb recognition of inverted faces disproportionately. In
this task, black-and-white photographs of 20 unknown
upright faces were shown sequentially for study (1 s each).

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The patient's performance in these standardized tests was
well within the normal range (Table 2). She had no
impairment in matching unfamiliar faces or identifying
familiar faces (i.e. no prosopagnosia). She made no
misidenti®cation of known or unknown faces. Caricatures,
faces in disguise and actors were all recognized correctly.
Similarly, her scores in the visual recognition memory test
were in the normal range (Table 3). False alarms were not
increased in the face memory task (Table 3), and signal
detection measures (Bindschaedler et al., 1996) showed
excellent discrimination ability (high value of d¢, corresponding to ef®cient discrimination of signal from noise),
without a signi®cant response bias in making recognition
judgements compared with the normal range (loose criteria
for familiarity decisions correspond to small or even negative
values of C; see below). Note, however, that her response
criteria appeared to be higher for words than faces, unlike
normal controls (Table 3). Finally, retrieval of biographical
information about well-known people in the Dead±Alive test
(Kapur et al., 1992) did not differ from results for normal
subjects (Table 3); her slightly poorer performance on dates
of death was probably due to the patient's young age
(Bindschaedler et al., 1995). Structured interviews with the
patient and her family (Ellis et al., 1989) revealed no loss in
semantic knowledge about close relatives.
From these tests and the clinical picture of the patient, who
never mistook for a stranger somebody she knew or failed to
name a person really familiar to her, it can be concluded that
she was not prosopagnosic and had no basic perceptual
dif®culties with faces. Therefore, her dif®culties with face
familiarity must have had an origin other than a de®cit in the
basic visual analysis of faces or memory.

895

896

P. Vuilleumier et al.

Table 4 Recognition of inverted and upright faces
No. of `old' responses
J. R. (controls)

d¢ value

Faces

Correct

False alarms

Inverted
Upright

11 (12.8 6 1.8)
10 (12.5 6 1.3)

8 (6.5 6 1.2)
1 (3.5 6 1.9)

.C value

J. R

Controls
95% CI

J. R.

Controls
95% CI

0.4
1.6

0.6 to 1.0
0.9 to 1.7

0.1
0.8

±0.1 to 0.2
0.1 to 0.5

Controls were eight age- and education-matched normal subjects (®ve females and three males, mean age 27.5 years). Signi®cant
differences between patient and controls are indicated in bold. CI = con®dence interval.

Results

The number of correct `old' responses made by J. R. was
within the controls' range for both inverted and upright faces,
but she tended to produce a greater proportion of incorrect
`old' responses for inverted faces (Table 4). Inversion
decreased face recognition sensitivity (d¢) in J. R. to a greater
degree than expected from the decrease in control subjects.
Her response criterion (C) did not differ from that of controls
for inverted faces, but was more conservative for upright
faces. Her mean reaction time for correct responses (1493 ms)
was comparable to that of controls (1331 6 574 ms). This
pattern would be consistent with a mild dif®culty arising
when recognition must rely more on the left hemisphere for
processing internal facial features.

Face parts task

This task compared recognition of facial parts and wholes in
separate phases. We used two versions (given a few days
apart), which used either famous or unknown faces. Each
version employed 24 black-and-white photographs of faces
that were cut out into four parts (hair, eyes, nose and mouth)
(Fig. 2A), yielding a total of 96 stimuli. In the study phase, 12
full target faces were presented on a computer screen (5 s
each). Two test phases immediately followed. First, all 48
parts from the target faces were presented in random order
mixed with 48 distractor parts from the other 12 faces.
Subjects made familiarity decisions (old/new) with a key
press. Stimuli remained on the screen until there was a
response. Immediately afterwards, a second test phase
assessed the recognition of whole faces. All target and
distractor faces were presented once again, but now in
wholes. Subjects made familiarity decisions (old/new) as in
the ®rst test. Response time and accuracy were recorded.

Results

J. R. showed no obvious de®cit in recognizing single facial
features from either famous or unknown people (Table 5).
Signal detection values con®rmed that her discrimination
sensitivity for facial parts and wholes was within or even
above the normal controls' range in all conditions. However,
she made more incorrect `old' judgements on `new' nose and
mouth parts [c2(1) = 4.0, P = 0.04] and used looser response
criteria for these parts compared with normal subjects. Her
mean reaction time for correct responses (1684 ms) was
similar to that of controls (1651 6 813 ms). These data
suggest that, despite her well-preserved visual discrimination
abilities, J. R. might have experienced some uncertainty when
using only local feature information as the basis for the
recognition of face familiarity, especially when such facial
features were new.

Altered face task

This task pitted recognition of parts and wholes against each
other within the same stimulus. It consisted of a continuous
recognition memory test in which 60 faces recurred once
each, intermingled in random order with 60 distractors (180
trials in total). Four additional faces served as a buffer at the
beginning of the test. All faces were from unknown persons.
Intervals from ®rst presentation to repetition varied between
10 and 60 intervening stimuli (mean 34). On repetition trials,
the target faces were either unchanged or altered at the
internal (eyes, mouth), external (hair) or global (whole face)
level (12 trials in each condition; Fig. 2B). All stimuli were
shown sequentially on a computer screen (1 s). Subjects were
required to indicate whether the face of any given person was
repeated or seen for the ®rst time by pressing one of two keys
(old/new).

Results

Table 6 shows that J. R. recognized the recurrence of
unchanged faces as well as normal subjects did [75 versus
83%; c2(1) = 0.09, P = 0.75] and made fewer false alarms to
new faces (19 versus 29%). The rate of `old' response to faces
that were altered on repetition trials was signi®cantly affected
by the type of change, both in J. R. [c2(3) = 15.6, P = 0.001] and
in normal subjects [c2(3) = 8.0, P = 0.050]. Such `old'

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Then, the same (old) faces and an equivalent number of new
faces were brie¯y presented upside-down (500 ms) in random
order. Familiarity (old/new) was indicated for each face by a
key press. In a third phase, the old faces and another set of
new distractors were presented in the normal upright position
using the same procedure. Response time and accuracy were
recorded.

Hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces

897

responses to altered faces were lower in J. R. than in normal
subjects when the hair was changed (25 versus 47%), but
higher when the eyes or mouth were changed (75±83 versus
54±67%), and identical when the whole face was changed
globally (58%). This pattern would be expected if J. R.
recognized familiarity by relying more on external and global
components of faces, and less on internal features (eyes and
mouth) compared with normal subjects. The total difference
between external and internal changes was signi®cant in J. R.
(10 versus 19 faces recognized out of 24, P = 0.002, Fisher's
test) but not in controls (mean 12.6 versus 14.5 recognized,

P = 0.15). Her mean reaction time for correct responses
(1382 ms) was also similar to that of controls (1472 6 667 ms).

Chimaeric face task

The above results are partly consistent with an impairment of face processing involving the left hemisphere,
possibly resulting in defective encoding of internal
features and abnormal reliance on global components.
However, all the preceding tests examined judgements of
familiarity in conditions in which the patient was required

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Fig. 2 Examples of stimuli used to test global and local visual processing. (A) Face parts. Unfamiliar
whole faces were presented in the study phase and their parts (hair, eyes, nose, mouth) were presented in
a subsequent recognition test. A similar task employed famous faces. (B) Altered faces. From ®rst
presentation (upper row) to repetition (lower row), target faces were either unchanged or altered at the
global (whole face), external (hair) or internal (eyes, mouth) level. (C) Chimaeric faces. Three kinds of
chimaera were constructed (the French actress Isabelle Adjani is shown as an example), using the global
contour and hair from a known face but changing the eyes or mouth (inner chimaeras), or vice versa
(outer chimaeras). The original face itself was not presented, and a given individual appeared only once.
For the patient, similar chimaeras were constructed using both famous faces and faces of relatives.

898

P. Vuilleumier et al.

Table 5 Recognition of facial parts and wholes
No. of old responses
J. R. (controls)

C value

J. R.

Controls
95% CI

J. R.

Controls
95% CI

1 (3.3 6 2.1)
2 (2.3 6 1.6)
6 (3 6 1.5)
4 (2.5 6 1.6)
0 (0.5 6 0.8)

2.4
1.2
0.7
0.9
4.7

0.8 to 2.0
0.7 to 2.1
0.2 to 1.1
0.4 to 1.5
3.4 to 4.1

0.2
0.4
±0.3
0.0
0.0

±0.4 to 0.5
0.0 to 0.8
0.0 to 0.9
0.1 to 0.9
±0.4 to 0.5

0 (0.5 6 0.5)
0 (0.8 6 0.5)
1 (2.4 6 1.2)
0 (2.5 6 1.8)
0 (0)

3.7
4.7
2.1
4.7
4.7

2.3 to 4.1
2.0 to 3.1
0.2 to 1.8
1.1 to 2.9
4.7

0.5
0.0
0.4
0.0
0.0

0.0 to 0.5
0.0 to 0.6
0.2 to 0.6
±0.3 to 0.2
0.0

Correct

False alarms

10 (8.8 6 1.3)
7 (7.3 6 1.3)
9 (5.3 6 1.9)
8 (6 6 1.7)
12 (11.5 6 0.5)
11 (10.5 6 1.2)
12 (9.8 6 1.4)
9 (6.4 6 1.8)
12 (10.0 6 1.3)
12 (12)

Controls were eight age- and education-matched normal subjects (®ve females and three males, mean age 27.5 years). Signi®cant
differences between patient and controls are indicated in bold. CI = con®dence interval.

Table 6 Recognition of altered faces
No. of `old' responses

Repeated faces
Unchanged
Global change
Hair change
Eyes change
Mouth change
New faces

J. R.

Controls (mean 6 SD)

9/12
7/12
3/12
10/12
9/12
23/120

10 6 0.8
7 6 2.7
5.6 6 1.8
8 6 1.7
6.5 6 2.6
34.5 6 15.4

Controls were eight age- and education-matched normal subjects
(®ve females and three males, mean age 27.5 years).

to recognize whether she had already seen a given face
rather than judge whether any particular face was from a
person known to her. Critically, her disturbing feeling of
abnormal familiarity with strangers in real life was
associated not only with an impression of past occurrence, but also with some aspect of personal relevance
and more intimate knowledge. Therefore, if preferential
encoding of global and external components at the
expense of internal features were suf®cient to induce
such a false familiarity, our patient would be expected to
judge mistakenly that she knew chimaeric faces who have
familiar external features and incorrect internal features,
but not faces with the reverse chimaeric manipulation (i.e.
familiar internal and unfamiliar external features).
In this task, we constructed chimaeric faces from photographs of 14 relatives of the patient, 14 famous actors and 21
unknown people. Seven faces in each category served as
unchanged stimuli, while the others were employed for
chimaeric stimuli. There were three possible chimaeras for
both relatives and famous people (Fig. 2C): outer contour
chimaeras (global contour and hair from an unknown face

with eyes and mouth from a known face); inner eyes
chimaeras (unknown eyes in known face contours); and
inner mouth chimaeras (unknown mouth in known face).
Each individual face and parts were used only once, resulting
in 63 stimuli. All faces were projected brie¯y (800 ms) on a
computer screen and familiarity judgements (known/unknown) were made by key press as quickly as possible.
Controls were tested with unknown and famous faces only.

Results

J. R. recognized real non-chimaeric faces normally, and
showed no increase in false alarms or response times to
chimaeric faces with familiar global contours (Table 7).
There was no difference for famous faces known through the
mass media and faces of personally known relatives. This
indicates that J. R. could still correctly assess the familiarity
of faces using both internal and global features within a single
face, and did not mistakenly recognize a face with familiar
global features as a known face.
Therefore, although the preceding experiments suggest that
the patient tended to rely more on face-processing abilities
subserved by the right than the left hemisphere, with the
patient showing better encoding of external than internal
features when the recognition of familiarity or a previous
encounter with a face was required (e.g. in the inverted face
and altered face tasks), this visual bias did not seem suf®cient
to induce a false feeling of personal acquaintance with
unknown faces, as otherwise exhibited by J. R. in her
everyday life.

Associative and semantic processes in face
recognition

The previous series of experiments showed that visual facial
processing was well preserved in J. R. overall. Preferential

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Unknown faces
Hair
Eyes
Nose
Mouth
Whole
Famous faces
Hair
Eyes
Nose
Mouth
Whole

d¢ value

Hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces
Table 7 Recognition of chimaeric faces

Table 8 Misattribution of fame

No. of `known' responses

No. of `fame' responses

J. R.

J. R.

Controls (mean 6 SD)

11/20
3/20
16/20

12.7 6 2.4
2.2 6 3.3
6.3 6 0.5

11/20
1/20
6/20

16.2 6 0.8
1.7 6 0.5
5.3 6 1.2

Controls (mean 6 SD)

2

061

6
1
1
0

661
161
161
0

7
0
0
0
1029 ms

(max. = 7)*
(max. = 7)*
(max. = 7)*
(max. = 7)*
1131 6 226 ms

Controls were four age- and education-matched normal subjects
(four females, mean age 27.4 years). *Controls were tested only
with unknown and famous faces, whereas J. R. was also tested
with faces of family relatives.

engagement of the right hemisphere for global visual analysis
of faces, with relatively de®cient encoding of local features in
the left hemisphere, could not fully account for her abnormal
feeling of personally knowing new faces. We therefore
designed the next series of experiments (performed 7 and 8
weeks after onset) to investigate whether impaired processing
of faces in the left hemisphere might affect a stage of stimulus
analysis beyond purely visual perceptual encoding, at the
level where associations with representations stored in
memory are formed and used to access speci®c information
about personal identity.

False fame and prior face exposure

Failure to activate appropriate semantic representations can
lead to false recognition and misattribution of familiarity
when retrieval of such information is necessary in order to
recognize (or reject) the source of subjective familiarity
induced by erroneous cues (Jacoby et al., 1989a; Whittlesea
and Williams, 1998). In normal people, previous exposure to
unknown names (Jacoby et al., 1989b) or unknown faces
(Bartlett et al., 1991) can generate such a feeling of
familiarity and induce erroneous judgements of celebrity,
especially when the individual fails to recollect the context
associated with prior exposure. We examined whether J. R.
would be abnormally prone to false familiarity effects under
such conditions.
In this task, a series of 60 faces were shown sequentially
and had to be judged as famous or unknown. No speci®c
biographical information or name was required. The stimuli
included 20 people with real but modest fame (e.g. minor
local politicians, second-rank artists etc.), together with 20
unknown people who had been presented only once as
distractors in a previous test (old lures), and 20 other

Faces
Real fame
New lures
Old lures
Names
Real fame
New lures
Old lures

Controls were six age- and education-matched normal subjects
(®ve females and one male, mean age 25.0 6 3.7 years). The bold
®gure indicates a signi®cant difference between patient and
controls.

unknown people who had not been seen before (new lures).
Stimuli were presented in random order without time
constraint.

Results

J. R. and normal controls made correct fame judgements for
55 and 63% of faces with real, though modest celebrity,
respectively (Table 8). For new lures (i.e. faces that had never
been seen before), J. R. made false fame judgements as often
as the controls (15 and 11%, respectively). Critically, when
confronted with the old lures (i.e. unknown faces that had
already been seen in a prior experiment), both J. R. and
normal controls made more false fame judgements compared
with the new lure faces [control mean: 32 versus 11%,
c2(1) = 15.6, P = 0.0001; patient mean 80 versus 15%,
P = 0.0001, Fisher's test] (Table 6). However, this increase in
false fame judgements for old lures was much higher in J. R.
than in normal subjects [c2(1) = 14.9, P = 0.0001], whereas
her ability to reject new lure faces and to recognize real
famous faces did not differ from that of normal subjects
[c2(1) = 0.03 and 0.21, respectively]. These data reveal that
J. R. was severely impaired in attributing a correct source to
false signals of familiarity with unknown faces, and showed a
marked bias towards considering unknown faces as known by
fame based on coarse signals of subjective familiarity.

False fame and prior name exposure

To determine whether our patient's abnormal increase in false
familiarity judgements was speci®c to faces or re¯ected a
more general bias in assessing the source of subjective
familiarity, a second task using names was given to her and
the same controls in a different session. As in the previous
face task, 60 proper names (e.g. Paul Martin) were presented
singly and had to be judged as famous or unknown. The
names included those of 20 people with real but modest fame

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Unknown people
Famous people
Real
Outer contour chimaeras
Inner eyes chimaeras
Inner mouth chimaeras
Relatives
Real
Outer contour chimaeras
Inner eyes chimaeras
Inner mouth chimaeras
Mean reaction time (correct)

899

900

P. Vuilleumier et al.

(e.g. minor politicians or artists), 20 unknown people already
seen as distractors in a previous test (old lures), and 20
unknown people never seen before (new lures). Stimuli were
presented in random order without time constraint.

Results

Associative processing and priming

In the prior exposure experiments, our patient showed an
abnormally high rate of familiarity misattribution for faces
that were unknown but previously seen in a different context
(but no such errors for names). This result reveals a marked
bias towards considering unknown faces as famous when
coarse signals of familiarity were elicited but failed to
activate more speci®c information in memory (e.g. to identify
the source of familiarity). This led us to consider whether
J. R. had a particular de®cit in activating stored representations that give access to identity-speci®c knowledge about a
face. This was examined in two different tests of face
priming, as used previously in normal subjects (Bruce et al.,
1993; Young et al., 1994) and prosopagnosics (De Haan et al.,
1992): (i) visual repetition priming, which refers to facilitated
recognition of a face that has been seen previously and
re¯ects activation of the visual representation of this face
(Bruce et al., 1993), possibly involving the right hemisphere
(GruÈsser and Landis, 1991); and (ii) associative semantic
priming, which involves facilitation of recognition based on
some information linked to a given person (such as the name
of the person or someone related), re¯ecting an activation of
speci®c identity knowledge, is maximal when the prime and
target concern the same individual (Young et al., 1994), and
possibly implicating more the left hemisphere (Rhodes,
1985).
Each test was given in a separate session. For visual
priming (face±face task), a face was ®rst shown for 2 s (to be
name aloud), and was immediately replaced by a second face
(target) that remained on the screen until a familiarity
decision (known/unknown) was made as quickly as possible
on the latter by pressing one of two keys (Fig. 3A). For
associative priming (name±face task), a name was ®rst shown
for 2 s (to be read aloud), again it was replaced by a face
(target) that remained on the screen until a speeded familiarity decision (Fig. 3B). Thus, in both tasks, familiarity

Results

Error rates were low in J. R. (4%) and healthy controls (8%)
in both tasks. Median correct reaction times (RTs) were
computed for each subject in each condition. Overall RTs
were similar in J. R. (mean 691 ms) and controls (mean
677 ms) in each task (unpaired t test, P > 0.45). Priming
effects were assessed by repeated-measures ANOVA (analysis of variance) on correct RTs to known faces, with the
different prime types as a factor, ®rst across and then within
individual controls to allow comparison with the patient.
In the face±face task, healthy controls showed reliable
visual priming (Table 9). There was a signi®cant effect of the
preceding face type on RTs [F(3,5) = 3.79, P = 0.03], due to
faster responses in the same-person condition compared with
others [t(5) > 2.94, P < 0.05]. There was no signi®cant effect
of same-category faces. J. R. showed the same pattern of
signi®cant priming effects (Table 8) (F = 2.34, P = 0.045 in
two different sessions), with faster responses after sameperson faces than after other face types (P < 0.05). The same
results were obtained in a second session 2 weeks later, in
which faces from close relatives (family and friends) were
added to those of celebrities, using the same four priming
conditions for the relatives and famous people as above
(Table 8). Healthy subjects from the same family showed
similar performance for both relatives and celebrities. These
results demonstrate intact visual identity-priming in J. R.
(Bruce et al., 1993).
In the name±face task, healthy controls again showed
signi®cant priming effects (Table 9) [F(3,7) = 7.36,
P = 0.002]. Their RTs were faster after same-person
names than in other conditions [t(7) > 3.1, P < 0.02],
consistent with facilitation of face recognition by the
activation of identity-speci®c associations (Young et al.,
1994). There was no signi®cant effect of same-category
names. These effects were found in each individual

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J. R. correctly recognized real fame and correctly rejected
new lures and controls did also (Table 8). Again, a signi®cant
increase in false fame judgements occurred for old lures (i.e.
previously exposed unknown names) compared with new
lures, both in normal controls [mean 27 versus 8%,
c2(1) = 14.7, P = 0.0001] and in the patient (30 versus 5%,
P = 0.050, Fisher's test). However, the rate of such errors was
not different between J. R. and controls [c2(1) = 0.06,
P = 0.80]. This indicates that the patient's de®cit in
associating subjective familiarity with a correct source was
not present with names, but concerned faces selectively.

decisions were always made on a face, but the face was
preceded either by another face (face±face visual priming) or
a written name (name±face semantic priming). Faces (and
names) of 30 celebrities from three categories (politicians,
actors, musicians) were selected to create 15 pairs of
associated people, while 30 unknown faces (and 30 unknown
names) served as unfamiliar stimuli. In each task, a famous
face could be preceded by four possible primes (30 trials per
condition): (i) the same person (but different pictures in the
face±face task to prevent same-stimulus repetition); (ii) a
related celebrity from the same category; (iii) a celebrity from
another category; or (iv) a neutral unknown person. Unknown
faces were also presented as ®llers, preceded by either a
known celebrity or an unknown person (30 trials per
condition). All trial types occurred in random order. The
critical conditions concerned the effect of identity-speci®c
priming for known faces, i.e. familiarity decisions that were
made on a known face preceded by either the face or the name
of the same person.

Hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces

901

control. By contrast, J. R. showed a very abnormal
pattern (Table 8). Whereas different name types had an
effect in the ®rst session (F = 2.72, P = 0.022) but not in
the second session (F = 1.23, P = 0.28), in both instances
the same-person names tended to slow rather than
facilitate familiarity decisions compared with neutral,
unknown names (P < 0.05). Impaired identity-priming
was replicated in both sessions for celebrities, and was
similar for faces of relatives and celebrities in the second
session (Table 8). Altogether, these priming results
suggest a disturbance in activating identity-speci®c
semantic associations in the patient when she made
judgements of familiarity, despite normal activation of the
visual representation of known faces (Bruce et al., 1993).

Discussion

We describe a young woman who, subsequent to a left
temporal venous infarction, exhibited a disturbing feeling of

familiarity, even intimacy, towards faces of people unknown
to her. Although she had no dif®culty recognizing people who
were already known, she mistook many new faces as
belonging to people with whom she was well acquainted.
Later, this phenomenon partly abated but remained more
frequent in familiar surroundings, even 1 year after onset. In
many respects, this disorder presented as the reverse of
prosopagnosia. Whereas prosopagnosics typically have right
inferior temporal lesions and no longer recognize familiar
faces (Landis et al., 1986, 1988; De Renzi et al., 1994), our
patient suffered left lateral temporal damage and experienced
exaggerated familiarity with unknown faces, even though she
could still identify known faces and learn new ones.
Occasional feelings of false familiarity with unknown faces
are not uncommon in normal people, though they are usually
faint and are rapidly acknowledged as a trivial error (Young
et al., 1985a). These impressions rarely lead to the conviction
of intimately knowing a stranger, to the point of searching at
length for any possible links, as in our patient. As an acute

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Fig. 3 Example of stimuli used to test face recognition priming. (A) Visual repetition priming (face±face
task). On each trial, a target face was preceded by the face of the same or another person. (B) Associative
semantic priming (name±face task). On each trial, a target face was preceded by the name corresponding
to the same or another person. In both tasks, the subject had to make a speeded familiarity judgement
(known/unknown) on the target face.

902

P. Vuilleumier et al.

Table 9 Visual and semantic priming of face recognition
Type of prime condition

Face±face task (visual priming)

Name±face task (semantic priming)

Patient J. R.

Controls*

Patient J. R.

Controls*

605
672
673
754

624 6 111
744 6 193
751 6 200
689 6 188

817
798
662
704

576 6 39
683 6 71
646 6 75
679 6 100

634
708
801
860

468 6 91
610 6 88
684 6 82
702 6 99

741
619
717
595

454 6 45
600 6 64
669 6 75
561 6 138

676
788
721
787

425 6 29
526 6 55
585 6 36
592 6 66

654
607
751
656

435 6 72
484 6 29
559 6 56
553 6 109

*Mean 6 SD of median reaction time. Controls were six age- and education-matched normal subjects (®ve females and one male, mean
age 26.2 6 4.0 years) in the face±face task of session 1; eight matched normal subjects (six females and two males, mean age 26.3 6 4.5
years) in the name±face task of session 1; and four normal subjects of the same family (two females and two males, mean age 31.7 6 4.6
years) in both tasks of session 2. Signi®cant de®cits between the patient and controls are indicated in bold.

neuropsychological impairment, in direct relation to a focal
cortical lesion, this phenomenon has never been reported
previously.
Using standardized and ad hoc tests, we tried to clarify the
nature of this disorder. Tests designed to uncover various
forms of prosopagnosia showed that our patient's face
recognition abilities were in the upper part of the range of
normal subjects. The same was true for memory, basic visual
perception and a comprehensive neuropsychological examination. Thus, J. R. was clearly not prosopagnosic and her
false familiarity could not be explained by a basic recognition
de®cit or general cognitive disturbances. Furthermore, her
errors did not involve the misidenti®cation of speci®c
individuals and delusional elaboration, as in FreÂgoli syndrome (Ellis and Young, 1990). False face recognition has
rarely been observed without prosopagnosia in patients with
right brain damage and piecemeal visual processing, in whom
misidenti®cation may result from resemblance to the local
facial features of a known person (Young et al., 1993;
Rapcsak et al., 1994). Misidenti®cation can also occur
without visual de®cit in patients with frontal damage and
confabulation, due to impaired monitoring (Rapcsak et al.,
1998, 1999) or inappropriate semantic associations (Ward
et al., 1999). These conditions all differ clearly from those of
our case. J. R. showed no frontal dysfunction, confabulation
or delusion. She performed normally on a variety of
discrimination, identi®cation and memory tasks with faces
and showed normal visual-repetition priming for known

faces, suggesting preserved perceptual input and preserved
formation of structural facial representations.
Among the variety of tests tapping different levels of face
processing, three signi®cant de®cits were found in J. R.: (i)
de®cient use of internal face parts to guide recognition; (ii)
lack of face-identity priming by known names during
familiarity judgements; and (iii) abnormal misattribution of
fame to unknown faces after incidental prior exposure. We
suggest that all three de®cits may similarly point to a
deterioration of face processing involving the left hemisphere
and greater reliance on right hemisphere function.
First, J. R. showed dif®culty recognizing upside-down
faces (inverted face task), with a tendency to rely more on
external and global features and less on internal parts (altered
face task) compared with normal subjects. It is known that
inversion suppresses the right-hemispheric advantage for face
recognition and requires the greater featural analysis mediated by the left hemisphere (e.g. Hillger and Koenig, 1991).
Moreover, although J. R. exhibited normal discrimination
sensitivity (d¢) for recognizing isolated features (face part
task), her response criterion (i.e. her subjective certainty)
appeared looser than that of normal subjects. Overall, this
would be consistent with relative failure to encode internal
facial parts by visual processes that depend on the left
hemisphere, and greater reliance on right-hemisphere processes encoding global features instead (Tanaka and Farah,
1993). Since internal features are more important for
identifying known faces (Ellis et al., 1979; Young et al.,

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Session 1: faces of celebrities
Same person
Related person
Unrelated person
Unknown person
Session 2: faces of celebrities and relatives
Celebrities
Same person
Related person
Unrelated person
Unknown person
Relatives
Same person
Related person
Unrelated person
Unknown person

Median reaction time (ms)

Hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces

face was elicited almost three times more often in J. R. than in
normal subjects. Such a de®cit was not found with names,
demonstrating that it was speci®c to faces. Since other tests
revealed that J. R. was unimpaired in judging whether a face
had already been presented (e.g. in memory tasks), it must be
concluded that her problem arose at the stage where a
personal association is evoked by seen faces, leading to a
subjective meaning, such as fame or personal acquaintance
(Damasio et al., 1990). This pathological rate of false fame
judgements in J. R. suggests an exaggerated bias towards
attributing personal meaning to unknown faces in the
presence of only minimal signals of familiarity (such as
those induced by incidental prior exposure in this task). This
misattribution of familiarity was speci®c to faces and unlikely
to re¯ect more general problems of memory source attribution, confabulation or dysexecutive impairment, given her
good performance in other general neuropsychological tests.
Semantic memory also appeared intact, including knowledge
about people (e.g. the Dead±Alive test) and naming, although
more formal testing of semantic memory was not conducted.
In normal subjects, a misattribution of subjective familiarity can also be induced by spurious signals based on
unconscious inferences and expectations, when more precise
information about the source of familiarity cannot be
accessed (Bartlett et al., 1991; Whittlesea and Williams,
1998; Yonelinas et al., 1999). Impaired access to personspeci®c associations was evidenced in J. R. by her lack of
identity priming in the name±face task, indicating that she
judged face familiarity without accessing semantic representations pertaining to identity-speci®c knowledge (such as
names), unlike normal subjects (Young et al., 1994). The fact
that she was much more prone to falsely recognizing fame in
unknown faces, even without accessing more precise information in memory, indicates that unconscious signals of
familiarity induced by the non-remembered prior exposure
with these faces was suf®cient to produce a much stronger
feeling of knowing these faces in her than in normal subjects
(Whittlesea and Williams, 1998). These ®ndings therefore
suggest not only decreased activation of speci®c semantic
associations about seen faces, but also a greater tendency to
activate associations of personal and affective meaning (Van
Lancker, 1991). This would be compatible with an imbalance
of face recognition mechanisms caused by impaired processing in the left hemisphere and the release of right hemisphere
processes, in the context of interactive callosal inhibition
between hemispheric functions (Regard et al., 1994; Cook
et al., 1995). Broad and unconsciously generated associations
about people might be more readily activated in the right
hemisphere, even by occasional unknown faces, and underlie
a subjective feeling of personal relevance and affective
relationship (Van Lancker, 1991; Seeck et al., 1993), while
the concomitant activation of more precise associations in the
left hemisphere would be necessary in order to focus
recognition on speci®c semantic knowledge related to a
single individual (Rhodes, 1985; Damasio et al., 1990;
Verstichel, 2001).

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1985b), erroneous familiarity might have arisen from resemblance to known faces on the basis of global or external traits,
in contrast to the piecemeal visual errors of right braindamaged patients (Rapcsak et al., 1994). However, de®cient
processing of internal facial parts with false familiarity based
on global traits is not suf®cient to explain J. R.'s disorder
because she made no false recognitions of chimaeric faces
that contained familiar external features with unknown
internal parts, and she could easily recognize caricatures in
which distinctive features were exaggerated and con®gurational cues were distorted (Rhodes et al., 1987). Therefore,
whereas an abnormal bias towards basing recognition on
global facial traits processed in the right hemisphere could
expose J. R. to spurious familiarity signals, some additional
factor must be necessary for such signals to be accepted
subjectively by the patient as compelling feelings of personally knowing a face.
Note that, in all of the above tests assessing the recognition
of altered faces or features, judgements of familiarity required
a decision as to whether a facial stimulus had already been
seen or not, and in such tests J. R. showed excellent
discrimination and memory abilities. However, her abnormal
feeling of familiarity with strangers in real life involved more
than a false judgement of past occurrence: she had a
compelling sentiment of knowing a person, with a strong
feeling of personal closeness and intimacy. The subjective
recollective experience triggered by seeing an individual face
is inherently dependent on the activation of a complex
network of associations between the visual representation of
that face and other stored knowledge, such as speci®c
biographical details, relevant episodes, particular contextual
situations, and affective links (Rhodes, 1985; Damasio et al.,
1990). A disorder within this network in our patient might
have altered the pattern of associations evoked by unknown
faces and distorted her subjective experience of familiarity.
In line with this, two other signi®cant de®cits in J. R. were
observed in tests that required a face to be associated with
distinctive information in memory, unique to the identity of a
known or previously seen person. Thus, she showed a
selective loss of identity-speci®c facilitation in the name±face
priming task (despite intact visual priming in the face±face
task), and a highly pathological rate of false fame attributions
to unknown faces after incidental prior exposure. Both
de®cits suggest a problem in the associative processes
involved in the recognition of a person (Burton et al., 1990;
Young et al., 1994), at the level where speci®c knowledge
pertaining to identity (e.g. a proper name in the semantic
priming task, or a unique contextual trace in the false fame
task) must be accessed from visual facial cues. In fact, the
most striking de®cit of J. R. in experimental tests of
familiarity was observed in the false fame task, in which
she had to judge not whether a face had been seen before, but
whether it was known by fame. In this task, she mistook as
famous ~80% of the faces that were basically not known but
had been seen just once before in earlier experiments. This
false feeling of having personal knowledge about an unknown

903

904

P. Vuilleumier et al.
semantically related faces (Damasio et al., 1988), which is
consistent with a role of the left temporal cortex in retrieving
information about known people. However, the contribution
of perceptual or naming dif®culties may be dif®cult to
establish in such cases because of the larger extent of cortical
and subcortical damage caused by arterial occlusion.
In summary, this case extends other reports suggesting that
abnormal face familiarity can arise from de®cits at several
stages of processing (Young et al., 1993; Rapcsak et al.,
1999; Ward et al., 1999). This implicates the activation of
associative networks integrating facial cues with more
complex representations of personal relevance (Burton et al.,
1990; Damasio et al., 1990; Schreiber et al., 1991; Hanley
et al., 1998) rather than only the abnormal activation of the
visual representation of known faces, as proposed by earlier
models (Bruce and Young, 1986). To our knowledge, this
case constitutes a new neuropsychological disorder that
demonstrates that both hemispheres have a signi®cant role in
face processing.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank colleagues and students who participated in
the experiments as control subjects, Tim Shallice, Bob Rafal,
Jamie Ward, Sophie Schwartz and Frederic Assal for helpful
comments and support, Margitta Seeck for providing face
stimuli, Claire Bindschaedler for providing tests and norms,
and the patient and her family for their cooperation. This
work was partly supported by grants from the Swiss National
Science Foundation to P.V. [FNS 632±06(5935)] and T.L.
[FNS 3100±06(5096.01)].

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Received June 18, 2002. Revised October 30, 2002.
Accepted November 4, 2002

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