All about Prosopagnosia: Inability to Recognize Familiar Faces

VIVA – Some people struggle throughout their lives with a confusing condition known as developmental prosopagnosia, where familiar faces look unfamiliar or recognizable. Some who have so-called face-blind people cannot even recognize themselves in a mirror. 

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People with prosopagnosia have difficulty distinguishing between faces and recognizing the identity of people they know, even those they see frequently. Prosopagnosia is typically caused by damage or dysfunction in the fusiform gyrus, a region of the brain that is involved in face processing.

Nowadays, most studies estimate that around 2 to 2.5 percent of the world's population has some form of such cognitive impairment. But according to new research from Harvard University, it may not be as rare as we previously thought.

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As the condition has gained greater media attention in recent years, more people have come forward to express their struggles with face blindness.

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Photo :

• arab-hams.com

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More than half of those who think they were born with the condition don't meet the most common diagnostic standards. These milder cases are not included in the research, and yet they stand out at a population level.

When researchers at Harvard gave a variety of rests and questionnaires on facial recognition to more than 3,100 adult participants in the United States, they found a cluster of people who scored quite poorly.

Depending on which diagnostic cut-offs were used for face blindness (of which there are many), the authors found the condition ranged from a prevalence of 0.13 percent up to 5.42 percent.

Today, the most common diagnostic standards are quite strict, typically including a combination of self-reports and objective tests. In the Harvard study, this strict threshold produced a diagnostic rate of nearly one percent.

However, this group of patients did not necessarily score the worst on facial recognition tests. Some who were not diagnosed with prosopagnosia under this strict criterion performed worse than those who were.

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The findings suggest face blindness exists on a spectrum, like many other developmental disorders, such as autism and multiple sclerosis. In total, researchers at Harvard identified 31 individuals who had major prosopagnosia and 72 individuals who had mild prosopagnosia. Together, that represents 3 percent of the entire sample size.