StarrLab: Neuropsychology, reading, and face recognition

Professor Randi Starrfelt

Degrees

• Doctor Psychologiae, 2018
• PhD in psychology, 2008
• Specialist in clinical neuropsychology, 2007
• MSc psych. 2000

Positions

• 2017 - : Professor (mso)
• 2013 - 2017: Associate Professor, Dept. of Psychology, University of Copenhagen
• 2011- 2013: Assistant professor, Dept. of Psychology, University of Copenhagen
• 2008 - 2011: Post.doc., Center for Visual Cognition, Dept. of Psychology, University of Copenhagen (Center of Excellence)
• 2005-2008: PhD student, Center for Visual Cognition, Dept. of Psychology, University of Copenhagen
• 2001-2004: Neuropsychologist, Hillerød Hospital, Denmark.
• 2000-2001: Psychologist/Research associate, Rogaland psychiatric hospital, Stavanger, Norway.

Organisation / Administration

• 2018 -       : Member of the Academic Council, Faculty of Social Sciences
• 2014-2017: Union representative (Danish Psychological Association) at Dept. of Psychology
• 2003-2012: International representantive, Danish Neuropsychological Society
• 2003-2006: President, Danish Neuropsychological Society
• 2002-2007: Board member, Danish Neuropsychological Society

Go to Randi Starrfelt's research profile.

• Starrfelt, Randi & Woodhead, Z., 2021. Reading and alexia (chapter 12) in Neurology of Vision and Visual Disorders. Elsevier.
• Rice, G. E., Kerry, S. J., Robotham, Ro Julia, Leff, A. P., Ralph, M. A. L., & Starrfelt, Randi, 2021. Category-selective deficits are the exception and not the rule: Evidence from a case-series of 64 patients with ventral occipito-temporal cortex damage. Cortex.
• Thorudottir, S., Sigurdardottir, H. M., Rice, G. E., Kerry, S. J., Robotham, Ro Julia, Leff, A. P. & Starrfelt, Randi, 2020. The Architect Who Lost the Ability to Imagine: The Cerebral Basis of Visual Imagery. Brain Sciences.
• Gerlach, C., Klargaard, S. K., Alnæs, D., Kolskår, K. K., Karstoft, J., Westlye, L. T. & Starrfelt, Randi, 2019. Left hemisphere abnormalities in developmental prosopagnosia when looking at faces but not words. Brain Communications.
• Hansen, Klaus & Starrfelt, Randi, 2019. Pure Alexia: A Combined First-Person Account and Neuropsychological Investigation. Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology.
• Gerlach, C., Hendel, Rebecca Thea Kjærgaard & Starrfelt, Randi, 2019. The good, the bad, and the average: Characterizing the relationship between face and object processing across the face recognition spectrum. Neuropsychologia.

For the full lists of publications, see:

• Randi Starrfelt's publication list
• Ro Robotham's publication list

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that impairs face recognition. People with DP never learn to recognize others by their faces in the fast and automatic manner that characterizes unimpaired face recognition. Research on DP has increased substantially over the last ~15 years, and is mainly conducted within the fields of cognitive neuropsychology and neuroscience, using quantitative experimental, cognitive, and brain imaging techniques.

In the present project, we will investigate the ‘phenomenology of prosopagnosia’, using in-depth interviews to explore what it is like to be prosopagnosic and specifically how people with DP experience perceiving, imagining, and remembering faces. The project will contribute to a fundamental characterization of DP, which will increase our understanding of the nature of DP, inform cognitive theory, and may lead to novel hypotheses about the cognitive and perceptual deficits involved.

The project is funded by a project grant from the Independent Research Fund – Denmark.

Project PI: Professor (mso) Randi Starrfelt.

Co-PI: Associate Professor Tone Roald.

The Back of the Brain project (BoB) is concerned with visual and cognitive deficits following stroke to posterior brain areas. This is a large, collaborative project, with key partners at University College London, University of Cambridge, and University of Manchester.

The aim of the project is to move beyond simple correlations between selective deficits in visual recognition (like pure alexia and prosopagnosia) and the corresponding lesions, and take a broader perspective on the deficits seen following lesions to posterior cortical areas. The project aims to bridge, integrate, and re(de)fine theories of visual recognition of different categories: words, objects, and faces. To achieve this aim, we have developed new experimental paradigms, and combine methods from neuropsychological single case approaches and experimental psychology with a large sample size, and high-resolution brain imaging.

This project is funded by a Sapere Aude - DFF Starting Grant from the Danish Council for Indpendent Research.

This project is in its concluding phase.

As part of this project, we have developed a freely available screening test for visual field deficits. Download the test here.

This project is about “face blindness”, or developmental prosopagnosia, as it is also called. It is estimated that about 2 % of the population suffers from great difficulties in recognising faces, even the faces of people they know well. This occurs in the absence of brain injury, other cognitive abilities are typically unaffected, and the face recognition problem is present throughout their lives. This has only recently become a topic of scientific investigation, and still little is known about the cause of this deficit. Using neuropsychological and experimental methods, as well as brain imaging, we investigate patterns of perceptual and cognitive performance in developmental prosopagnosia and normal controls. In addition, we investigate face recognition performance in a much more well known developmental disorder: developmental dyslexia, in order to learn more about the relationship between reading and face recognition. We are also interested in people with superior face recognition.

This project is a collaboration between several departments at Danish universities (University of Southern Denmark and UCPH), as well as NORMENT at the University of Oslo, Norway. The project is supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research - Humanities. (PI: Professor Christian Gerlach, SDU).

This project is in its concluding phase. Follow the output from the study on ResearchGate.

Are you faceblind? If you want to participate or learn more about our project you can read more about it here. 

The Pure alexia symposium took place in Copenhagen on 15 - 17 May 2013. It was funded by the Sapere Aude programme: Independent Research Fund Denmark.

I had the fortune of working with Tim Shallice to organize an expert symposium about pure alexia in Copenhagen in 2013. 28 scientists working with reading and alexia gathered for three days discussing recent findings in pure alexia research and how the research field may move forward towards a better understanding of reading and visual word recognition. The conference resulted in a special issue of the journal Cognitive Neuropsychology. In the introductory paper, Tim Shallice and I discuss how pure alexia has been and should be defined. The paper is freely available here.

See images, stories, abstracts and more here: Pure alexia meeting Copenhagen.

International collaboration

• Jason Barton, Professor, PhD, Dept of Neuro-opthalmology, University of British Columbia, Canada.
• Marlene Behrmann, Professor, PhD, Dept. of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
• Matt Lambon-Ralph, Professor, PhD, Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, UK
• Alex Leff, MD, Ph.D., Professor, Institute of Neurology, University College, London, UK
• Marialuisa Martelli, Associate professor, PhD, University of Rome - La Sapienza, Italy
• Heida Maria Sigurdardottir, Assistant professor, PhD, & Arni Kristjansson, Professor, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Reykjavik, Iceland
• Kathleen Vancleef, PhD, Postdoctoral fellow, Medical Science Division, University of Oxford, UK
• Lars Tjelta Westlye, Professor, PhD, Dept. of Psychology, University of Oslo, and NORMENT, Norway

National collaboration

• Tobias S. Andersen, Associate professor, Danish Technical University
• Sofie Beier, Associate professor, School of Design, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
• Christian Gerlach, Professor, Dept. of Psychology, University of Southern Denmark
• Maria Nordfang, Neuropsychologist, Department of Neurology, Rigshospitalet, Glostrup, and Associate professor, Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University
• Mads Poulsen, Associate professor, Department of Nordic studies and Linguistics, UCPH
• Katrine Sand, Neuropsychologist, Department of Neurology, Zealand University Hospital
• Jacob Wienecke, Associate professor, Department of Nutrition, Exercise, and Sports, UCPH