Alexandra Haralanova¹ (), Alexis Kidder¹, Christopher Baker¹; ¹National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a condition characterized by severe impairment in face recognition ability despite typical early visual processing and the absence of any known brain lesions (McConachie, 1976). The underlying causes of atypical face recognition are unclear, though theories include memory recall deficits or problems with perceptual encoding. Prior neuroimaging work has primarily focused on perceptual encoding and visual-selectivity, reporting the presence of the typical face-selective regions in DP participants, but with reduced selectivity. In contrast, here we focused on memory recall for people and places. In neurotypicals (NT), we have previously described alternating regions along the medial parietal cortex (MPC) wall which preferably responded to self-generated recall of people or places (Silson, Steel, et al. 2019). For this study, we asked NT (n = 13) and DP (n = 7) participants to recall and visualize personally familiar people and places from memory without any visual input besides name prompts. The people and places that the participants recalled were selected by the participants prior to the scan. We also functionally localized visually-selective regions, including those responsive to faces, bodies, objects, and scenes. Consistent with prior reports, we could localize the major visually face-selective regions in both NT and DP participants, although the DP participants often showed more activation in frontal cortex. We were also able to find the expected alternating patterns of activation along MPC for recall of people and places in most participants, as well as strong activation of anterior scene-selective cortex for recall of places. We are systematically comparing these activation patterns within and across groups, quantifying the relationship between activation magnitude and self-reported vividness of imagery for the people and places. These results indicate that the topography of functional activation is similar in DP to NT participants for both visual encoding and recall of faces.