Abstract
The authors tested face discrimination, face recognition, object discrimination, and
object recognition in two face transplantation patients (FTPs) who had facial injury
since infancy, a patient who had a facial surgery due to a recent wound, and two control
subjects. In Experiment 1, the authors showed them original faces and morphed forms
of those faces and asked them to rate the similarity between the two. In Experiment
2, they showed old, new, and implicit faces and asked whether they recognized them
or not. In Experiment 3, they showed them original objects and morphed forms of those
objects and asked them to rate the similarity between the two. In Experiment 4, they
showed old, new, and implicit objects and asked whether they recognized them or not.
Object discrimination and object recognition performance did not differ between the
FTPs and the controls. However, the face discrimination performance of FTP2 and face
recognition performance of the FTP1 were poorer than that of the controls were. Therefore,
the authors concluded that the structure of the face might affect face processing.
Keywords
face transplantation - face discrimination - face recognition
