Psychology & Psychiatry

How common is face blindness?

Face blindness, a mystifying condition that can trick us into believing we recognize people we've never met or make us fail to recognize those we have, has been previously estimated to affect between 2 and 2.5 percent of ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Video: Face blindness study sheds light on typical brain function

People with acquired prosopagnosia recognize few faces, a condition known also as "face blindness." These are people who have suffered brain damage that interferes with their ability to recognize faces, even the faces of ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

The fundamental mechanisms of facial recognition

When it comes to recognizing faces, humans are extraordinarily skillful. It's no surprise – after all, from the moment humans leave the womb, the infant brains already have a preference for faces, and over the course of ...

Prosopagnosia (Greek: "prosopon" = "face", "agnosia" = "not knowing") is a disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize faces is impaired, while the ability to recognize other objects may be relatively intact. The term originally referred to a condition following acute brain damage, but a congenital form of the disorder has been proposed, which may be inherited by about 2.5% of the population. The specific brain area usually associated with prosopagnosia is the fusiform gyrus.

Few successful therapies have so far been developed for affected people, although individuals often learn to use 'piecemeal' or 'feature by feature' recognition strategies. This may involve secondary clues such as clothing, gait, hair color, body shape, and voice. Because the face seems to function as an important identifying feature in memory, it can also be difficult for people with this condition to keep track of information about people, and socialize normally with others.

Some also use the term prosophenosia, which refers to the inability to recognize faces following extensive damage of both occipital and temporal lobes.

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