People with prosopagnosia initially are often aware of their condition, commonly reporting the inability to recognize the faces of their friends and family (Goldsmith and Liu, 2001). A typical complaint is that the patients cannot recognize their own faces when looking in a mirror, but they know that the face belongs to them. Moreover, people with prosopagnosia report knowing that they are looking at faces and often they can identify the gender, race and approximate age of the person (Goldsmith and Liu, 2001). Thus, even though recognitions in not preserved, intellect is. Another part of being unable to identify faces, even though they can identify so much about a face, is being unable tell whether someone is familiar to you or not based on their face(Goldsmith and Liu, 2001). A person with prosopagnosia may describe the characteristics of their best friend in a picture, but say that they do not know the person in the picture.
Many (if not most) people with prosopagnosia have normal or above-normal performance on tests of intelligence, memory, and language comprehension(Goldsmith and Liu, 2001). Verbal intelligence scores are often higher than nonverbal scores. When performing tasks that involve geometric figure recall, people with prosopagnosia show high accuracy results (Goldsmith and Liu, 2001). Some people with prosopagnosia have normal reading and writing abilities, however a few also show some latency on such tasks. Also some people with prosopagnosia have difficulty in recognizing motion (Goldsmith and Liu, 2001).
This here is a picture of a man with prosopagnosia. He lost the ability to identify his family, but he could still identify his sheep! Read more about this man.
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