All about Prosopagnosia: Inability to Recognize Familiar Faces
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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.
Expanded to a population level, that's roughly 10 million Americans who may suffer from face blindness, millions of whom are currently left out of the picture, "This is important on several levels," explains psychiatrist Joseph DeGutis from Harvard.
"First, the majority of researchers have used overly strict diagnostic criteria and many individuals with significant face-recognition problems in daily life have been wrongly told they do not have prosopagnosia." He added.
If scientists working on face blindness loosen these parameters, more people who struggle with facial recognition might seek out workarounds and tricks to help them identify faces. And as long as these milder cases are included alongside more severe cases in research, they do not seem to significantly dilute the overall pool of patients.
"This provides support for (developmental prosopagnosia) existing on a continuum rather than representing a discrete group. This finding provides preliminary support for the assertion that using more relaxed diagnostic criteria does not appreciably change the nature of the disorder being studied," Scientists at Harvard stated.
Another paper published at the end of 2022 makes a similar argument. Loosening the diagnosis for face blindness is more inclusive, the authors argue, and will ultimately expand our limited knowledge of the disorder.
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