Prosopagnosia is more commonly known as face blindness. People with prosopagnosia cannot consciously recognize faces. They will not even be able to recognize their own. Many people with prosopagnosia can describe the face and its expressions but cannot recognize whose face it is. They still show emotional responses to the faces (when you see your heart-throb, even though you cannot describe his/her face or even say who it is, your heart will throb and you will be excited by seeing them, regardless of your inability to identify him/her). This may be due to recognizing a person through another cue, like familiar voice or clothing.

For a light hearted, but informative look at how it feels to have face blindness (prosopagnosia) please read this interpretation.

The ability to recognize a familiar face is an extremely important behavior used in almost every face to face interpersonal interaction. Even young infants have the ability to recognize faces, emphasizing the importance of this skill socially and evolutionarily. Beginning at around five years of age facial recognition begins to improve and continues to improve until adulthood (Goldsmith and Liu, 2001). Facial recognition requires first perceiving the face, then analyzing its features, matching the face to faces stored in your memory and in many instances, retrieving its name. Evidence suggests that facial recognition is a discrete neurological behavior with regions of the brain dedicated primarily to this task (Goldsmith and Liu, 2001).

Features of Prosopagnosia

Types of Prosopagnosia

Causes of Prosopagnosia

Treatment for Prosopagnosia

A personal tale from Maria, a woman with prosopagnosia

Maria T. expresses how she feels in life with prosopagnosia. "I've never seen that person before in my life" is my usual mental response to 'familiar people I encounter daily. Though I clearly view persons in my visual field my brain fails to 'store' most faces in memory thus I usually don't remember a face after I see it. My world, it seems, consists mostly of strangers. I suppose when they passed out that facial recognition skill (in infancy) I must have been snoozing, (somebody should've nudged me ;-). Maria T. Maria's webpage

How do face blind people manage to live their lives? Click here. Often Face blind people learn to recognize others by non-facial characteristics such as hair or typical clothing styles. Many will often keep a list of people they are likely to meet, so that they know who to expect.

Click here to read about Cicilia's prosopagnosia.

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The Charlie Brown pictures are from a website about having prosopagnosia. Please visit it.