Affiliations: Department of Neurology, University of Arizona,
Tucson, AZ, USA | Neurology Section, Southern Arizona VA Health Care
System, Tucson, AZ, USA | Department of Psychology, University of Arizona,
Tucson, AZ, USA
Note: [] Corresponding author: Steven Z. Rapcsak, M.D., Department of
Neurology, University of Arizona, Health Sciences Center, 1501 N. Campbell Ave,
Tucson, AZ 85721, USA. Tel.: +1 520 626 3748; E-mail: szr@u.arizona.edu
Abstract: Patients with frontal lobe damage and cognitively normal elderly
individuals demonstrate increased susceptibility to false facial recognition.
In this paper we review neuropsychological evidence consistent with the notion
that the common functional impairment underlying face memory distortions in
both subject populations is a context recollection/source monitoring deficit,
coupled with excessive reliance on relatively preserved facial familiarity
signals in recognition decisions. In particular, we suggest that due to the
breakdown of strategic memory retrieval, monitoring, and decision operations,
individuals with frontal lobe impairment caused by focal damage or age-related
functional decline do not have a reliable mechanism for attributing the
experience of familiarity to the correct context or source. Memory illusions
are mostly apparent under conditions of uncertainty when the face cue does not
directly elicit relevant identity-specific contextual information, leaving the
source of familiarity unspecified or ambiguous. Based on these findings, we
propose that remembering faces is a constructive process that requires dynamic
interactions between temporal lobe memory systems that operate in an automatic
or bottom-up fashion and frontal executive systems that provide strategic
top-down control of recollection. Executive memory control functions
implemented by prefrontal cortex play a critical role in suppressing false
facial recognition and related source memory misattributions.
Keywords: Face memory, false recognition, frontal lobe damage, cognitive aging
