Familiar people recognition disorders: An introductory review

The aim of this introduction is to provide a general background for the individual contributions dealing with different aspects of familiar people recognition disorders. Following are the main points considered in this survey: 1) the cognitive models proposed to explain the functional architecture of processes subsuming familiar people recognition; 2) the different roles of the right and left hemisphere in identifying people by face voice and name; 3) the anatomical structures and the cognitive processes involved in face and voice recognition; 4) the interactions that exist among the perceptual processes subsuming face and voice recognition, but not people's faces, voices and proper names; 5) the patterns of multimodal defects of familiar people recognition and their implications for current cognitive models. Finally, there is a short discussion of two models advanced to explain the role of the anterior temporal lobes in people recognition.