Faces, Music and Voices: Evidence for a Right-dominant Anterior Temporal Agnosia Syndrome

Acquired prosopagnosia is often associated with other deficits, such as dyschromatopsia and topographagnosia, from damage to adjacent perceptual networks. Our recent study showed that some subjects with developmental prosopagnosia also have congenital amusia, but it is not known whether those with the acquired variant have similar problems with music perception. Our goal was to determine if any subjects with acquired prosopagnosia also have acquired amusia, and if so, whether the presence of amusia was linked to a specific functional or anatomical variant of prosopagnosia.

Poster 180 Faces, Music and Voices: Evidence for a Right-dominant Anterior Temporal Agnosia Syndrome Jason Barton1, Jacob Stubbs1, Sebastien Paquette2, Gottfried Schlaug2, Sherryse Corrow3 1 University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 2Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 3Bethel University, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA Introduction: Acquired prosopagnosia is often associated with other deficits, such as dyschromatopsia and topographagnosia, from damage to adjacent perceptual networks. Our recent study showed that some subjects with developmental prosopagnosia also have congenital amusia, but it is not known whether those with the acquired variant have similar problems with music perception. Our goal was to determine if any subjects with acquired prosopagnosia also have acquired amusia, and if so, whether the presence of amusia was linked to a specific functional or anatomical variant of prosopagnosia. Methods: We studied eight subjects with acquired prosopagnosia from a comprehensively documented cohort, all of whom had extensive neuropsychological and neuroimaging testing. They performed a battery of tests evaluating pitch and rhythm processing, including the Montreal Battery for the Evaluation of Amusia. Results: Three of eight subjects with acquired prosopagnosia had impaired musical pitch perception, and two were impaired in recognition memory for music, while rhythm perception was spared. One subject reported loss of enjoyment of music, while paradoxically two of the three impaired subjects reported enhanced appreciation of music. The lesions of these three subjects affected the right or bilateral temporal poles as well as the right amygdala and insula: two had an amnestic variant of prosopagnosia. None of the three subjects with apperceptive prosopagnosia from lesions limited to the inferior occipitotemporal cortex had impaired pitch perception or recognition memory for music. Conclusions: While the apperceptive variant of prosopagnosia from fusiform lesions is associated with dyschromatopsia and topographagnosia as part of a 'ventral visual syndrome', the current findings and the results of our previous study of voice recognition (1) indicate that the amnestic variant of prosopagnosia can be associated with amusia and phonagnosia, as part of a right-dominant 'anterior temporal agnosia syndrome'. References: 1. Liu R, Pancaroglu R, Hills CS, Duchaine B, Barton JJS. Voice recognition in face-blind patients. Cerebral Cortex 26, 1473-87, 2016. Keywords: Higher Visual Cortical functions, Higher visual functions Financial Disclosures: The authors had no disclosures. Grant Support: CIHR operating grant (MOP-102567) to JB. JB was supported by a Canada Research Chair and the Marianne Koerner Chair in Brain Diseases. G. S. acknowledges support from NIH (DC009823, DC008796). S.P. is supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowships from the Canad 2018 Annual Meeting | 324