With Childhood Hemispherectomy, One Hemisphere Can Support—But is Suboptimal for—Word and Face Recognition

Abstract

The left and right cerebral hemispheres are important for word and face recognition, respectively—a specialization that emerges over human development. But children who have undergone a hemispherectomy develop with only one hemisphere. The question is whether this preserved hemisphere, be it left or right, can support both word and face recognition. Here, a large sample of patients with childhood hemispherectomy and age-matched controls performed word- and face-matching tasks. Controls viewed stimuli either in one visual field (restricting initial processing to one hemisphere) or, like the patients, in central vision. Across word and face tasks, patients performed comparably to controls using primarily one hemisphere, but more poorly than controls viewing stimuli centrally with both hemispheres engaged. Additionally, patients showed deficits in low-level visual processing that may explain their word/face recognition deficits relative to controls. Altogether, the findings suggest that either hemisphere alone can support word and face recognition, albeit sub-optimally.