An Update of the Benton Facial Recognition Test

The Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT) is a paper-and-pen task that is traditionally used to assess face perception skills in neurological, clinical and psychiatric conditions. Despite criticisms of its stimuli, the task enjoys a simple procedure and is rapid to administer. Further, it has recently been computerised (BFRT-c), allowing reliable measurement of completion times and the need for online testing. Here, in response to calls for repeat-screening for the accurate detection of face processing deficits, we present the BFRT-Revised (BFRT-r): a new version of the BFRT-c that maintains the task’s basic paradigm, but employs new, higher quality stimuli that reflect recent theoretical advances in the field. An initial validation study with typical participants indicated that the BFRT-r has good internal reliability and content validity. A second investigation indicated that while younger and older participants had comparable accuracy, completion times were longer in the latter, highlighting the need for age-matched norms. Administration of the BFRT-r and BFRT-c to 32 individuals with developmental prosopagnosia resulted in improved sensitivity in diagnostic screening for the BFRT-r compared to the BFRT-c. These findings are discussed in relation to current diagnostic screening protocols for face perception deficits. The BFRT-r is stored in an open repository and is freely available to other researchers.

Normative data for accuracy and response times at the computerized Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT-c)

We report normative data from a large (N=307) sample of young adult participants tested with a computerized version of the long form of the classical Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT; Benton & Van Allen, 1968). The BFRT-c requires to match a target face photograph to one or three of 6 face photographs simultaneously presented. Percent accuracy at the BFRT-c (81%-83%) is below ceiling yet well above chance level, with little interindividual variance in this typical population sample, as expected from a sensitive clinical test. While split-half reliability on accuracy rates is relatively low due to the large variability in difficulty across items, correct response times (RTs) measured in this version – completed in 3 minutes on average - provide a reliable and critical complementary measure of performance at individual unfamiliar face matching. In line with previous observations from other measures, females outperform male participants at the BFRT-c, especially for female faces. In general, performance is also lower following lighting changes than head rotations, in line with previous studies emphasizing limited ability at matching pictures of unfamiliar faces with important variations in lighting direction. Overall, this normative data set supports the validity of the BFRT-c as a key component of a battery of tests identifying clinical impairments at individual face recognition such as observed in acquired prosopagnosia. However, beyond global indexes of performance based on accuracy rates only, this analysis strongly recommends full consideration of the time taken to match individual faces as well as the variability in performance across items.

Facial emotion processing in schizophrenia: a non-specific neuropsychological deficit?

BackgroundIdentification of facial emotions has been found to be impaired in schizophrenia but there are uncertainties about the neuropsychological specificity of the finding.MethodTwenty-two patients with schizophrenia and 20 healthy controls were given tests requiring identification of facial emotion, judgement of the intensity of emotional expressions without identification, familiar face recognition and the Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT). The schizophrenia patients were selected to be relatively intellectually preserved.ResultsThe patients with schizophrenia showed no deficit in identifying facial emotion, although they were slower than the controls. They were, however, impaired on judging the intensity of emotional expression without identification. They showed impairment in recognizing familiar faces but not on the BFRT.ConclusionsWhen steps are taken to reduce the effects of general intellectual impairment, there is no deficit in identifying facial emotions in schizophrenia. There may, however, be a deficit in judging emotional intensity. The impairment found in naming familiar faces is consistent with other evidence of semantic memory impairment in the disorder.

Perception of facial and vocal affect by people with schizophrenia in early and late stages of illness

BackgroundEmotion recognition impairments have been demonstrated in schizophrenia, but few studies have examined whether these reflect generalised or specific perceptual deficits or are associated with illness course.AimsTo examine the nature of emotion recognition abnormalities in patients with schizophrenia at different stages of illness.MethodWe examined the performance of 50 in-patients with early-stage schizophrenia, 50 with chronic schizophrenia and 50 healthy controls on the Benton Facial Recognition Test, Facial Emotion Recognition Test and Voice Emotion Recognition Test.ResultsPatients with chronic schizophrenia were significantly more impaired than other groups on the emotional tasks, even after controlling for impairments in non-emotional stimuli. Individual emotion recognition accuracy for the two sensory modalities was not significantly positively correlated for either group with schizophrenia.ConclusionsEmotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia are trait features of the disorder and increase with illness duration.