No Association Between Face Recognition and Spatial Navigation: Evidence from Developmental Prosopagnosia and Super-Recognizers

TL;DR

This study finds no direct link between face recognition and spatial navigation abilities in people with face recognition extremes and typical individuals.

Contribution

The study directly tests and refutes a potential interdependence between face recognition and spatial navigation.

Findings

DPs, SRs, and controls performed similarly in route repetition and retracing tasks.

Only a few individuals from the DP and SR groups showed worse performance in route retracing.

Face recognition and spatial navigation appear to be distinct cognitive skills.

Abstract

Background/Objectives: Previous studies have reported associations between prosopagnosia and spatial navigation, but it remains unclear whether this link is merely coincidental (i.e., observable only in prosopagnosia) or genuinely interdependent (i.e., such that variation in one ability predicts variation in the other across the full spectrum of face-recognition abilities). This study aimed to directly test this possibility by examining the relationship between face recognition and navigational skills in developmental prosopagnosics (DPs), super-recognizers (SRs), and control participants. Methods: Eighteen DPs, sixteen SRs, and twenty-eight control participants were tested in a recently validated route-learning task, in which they were asked to memorize a route from a first-person perspective. In the subsequent test stages, both route repetition and route retracing were assessed. Results: Group analyses showed comparable performance in route repetition and retracing across the three groups. Single-case analyses confirmed these findings and indicated that only two DPs and two SRs performed worse than control participants in route retracing. Conclusions: These findings suggest that spatial navigation and face recognition are not directly associated and therefore appear to be different skills.

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