[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/)

# Does acquisition of Greeble expertise in prosopagnosia rule out a domain-general deficit?

Bukach et al, 2012, Neuropsychologia — Neuroscience

Patterns: [Distinctions](https://dsrpevidence.org/pattern/distinctions)

## In short

Through training, a neurologically impaired human can learn to distinguish between objects with time. i,e, Distinction-making can be trained.

## What they found (results)

The prosopagnoisac took significantly longer to obtain expert status, however, they did eventually obtain it.

## What they set out to do (purpose)

Can someone with prosopahnoisa recognize distinctions in greebles?

## In more detail

Bukach et al. 2012 attempted to teach a prosopagnosic participant how to recognize the previously mentioned greebles. Prosopagnosia is a condition in which the person does not have the ability to recognize faces compared to other types of objects. They wrote that, “...the expertise account of face-specificity hypothesizes that face recognition is a particular example of more domain-general mechanisms that potentially support expert-level within-category individuation across most visually homogeneous object categories.” They mention that some studies done on neurotypical people have called into question the specificity of facial recognition, and it might not be faces that have a specific recognition point, but another aspect of that kind of Distinction. This participant’s prosopagnosia developed after the anterior temporal lobe was damaged in a car accident. Along with this impaired participant, 5 age-matched male participants were tested as a control. The procedure for this experiment was replicated from Gauthier and Tarr 1997 study mentioned above. The only difference was that they learned 30 of the greebles at the family level, but only learned 20 at the individual level. The impaired participant performed significantly worse than the control participants. He had to use alternative strategies such as figuring out the family that the greeble belonged to first, and then figuring out the individual identity. It took this participant extra trials to be able to meet the expert criteria than the controls did. What is interesting, however, is that the participant with prosopagnosia could be considered an “expert” at all. That indicates that even people who are impaired in their distinction-making have the ability to learn how to distinguish things more accurately and quickly.

These researchers were not testing DSRP. The finding is theirs; the correspondence to DSRP is drawn by this site.

[Source](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.11.023)