Modern Psychological Studies
Volume
32
Number
2
Publisher
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Place of Publication
Chattanooga (Tenn.)
Abstract
This article reviews prosopagnosia and pure alexia as windows on hemispheric specialization for faces and words. Classical case reports describe prosopagnosia after right fusiform damage and pure alexia after left occipito-temporal lesions. These double dissociations have been used to argue for separate and strongly lateralized modules. Recent evidence from clinical, neuroimaging, developmental, and neurosurgical studies complicates this view. Some patients with prosopagnosia show mild but reliable deficits on reading tasks. Some patients with pure alexia show subtle deficits in face recognition or object recognition. Lesion mapping and diffusion imaging studies point to damage in shared but biased networks rather than isolated modules. Developmental and surgical work shows that one hemisphere can support both faces and words but with reduced efficiency. Large-sample imaging and lateralization studies reveal wide individual variation and weak coupling between word dominance and face dominance. This narrative review brings together these findings and argues for a graded spectrum view of hemispheric specialization. Specialization for faces and words is better described as overlapping networks in both hemispheres than as two separate modules. This view has consequences for diagnosis, for models of cortical recycling, and for theories of modularity.
Document Type
Article
DCMI Type
Text
Language
English
Rights
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Recommended Citation
Şırlakoğlu, Ege
(2026)
"Prosopagnosia, pure alexia, and the spectrum of hemispheric specialization for faces and words: A narrative review,"
Modern Psychological Studies: Vol. 32:
No.
2, Article 4.
Available at:
https://scholar.utc.edu/mps/vol32/iss2/4
Department
Dept. of Psychology