The contribution of the right and left hemisphere to the face perception

Abstract

Face perception, one of most important social abilities, can be defined as the ability to perceive face as a whole along with all of its parts and the relations between them. This face-specific strategy is titled configural processing. Recent studies have shown that the degree of expression of configural processing strategy depends on the quality of stimulus material utilized during the experiment. Specifically, it was demonstrated that configural face processing is mostly applied towards faces of familiar or famous people whereas unfamiliar people’ faces are rather processed as physical objects. Here we report our findings from the neuropsychological assessment of 22 patients with lesions in the posterior regions of the brain who performed part-whole recognition tasks.  Our results showed that familiar faces with non-specific details are processed as social stimulus via configural face processing. Right hemisphere was found to manage this type of face processing. Left hemisphere is in turn responsible for processing of faces of unfamiliar people without non-specific features.