Face discrimination abilities in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy
Résumé
Given the questionable relevance of animal studies for understanding the neural basis of human face recognition, intracranial recordings in temporal epileptic patients become increasingly valuable. However, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients’ ability to individuate faces remains poorly documented. Here, we tested 42 patients with left (n¼17) or right (n¼25) TLE and 42 healthy matched controls. Seven computerized neuropsychological tests were administered: the Benton Face Recognition Test, the Cambridge Face Memory Test, delayed matching of upright and inverted faces and objects, famous face recognition and naming, and old/new face and object tasks. Overall, we found that (a) left TLE patients did not differ from their controls at individuating unfamiliar faces; (b) at the group level, right TLE patients had lower accuracy at matching upright faces than their controls. However, this was explained by only a subset (24%) of patients being impaired in several face and object tasks. This impaired
subgroup was clearly identifiable by several clinical features (i.e., longer epilepsy duration, lower IQ, older age) that should be taken into consideration when evaluating the neural basis of human face recognition with intracerebral recordings.