Prosopagnosia: What It Is, Symptoms, Types, Causes And Treatment

People are equipped with a brain structure capable of identifying the most distinctive social stimulus of a person’s identity: the face. In the first years of your life, this powerful source of information has the following functions:

• Recognize their parents and interact with them.
• Establish social relationships.
• Influencing the choices of others, such as making a partner or pursuing a professional career.

When this recognition system fails, we speak of prosopagnosia, a perceptual deficit acquired or congenital, of the central nervous system which prevents those affected from recognizing the overall features of people’s faces.

Bodamer in 1947 was the first to give a definition of prosopagnosia, with reference to the inability to recognize familiar faces, keeping intact the ability to combine unfamiliar faces and perceive facial expressions. Initially, prosopagnosia was considered an acquired deficiency, derived from brain lesions, although today it is known that it is a disorder that can be present from birth in the absence of damages suffered.

A person with prosopagnosia does not recognize any face, from their own to a close family member or a person with whom they interact daily. The inability to recognize faces, induced by prosopagnosia, has several consequences for those affected. Let’s see what the symptoms of prosopagnosia are:

• Social phobia.
• Difficulties establishing relationships Strong interpersonal relationships with family or friends.
• Difficulties establishing new interpersonal relationships.
• Relationship problems in the school/work environment.
• moments of depression due to social relationship difficulties.
• Inability to recognize facial expressions.
• Inability to estimate age of a person, even approximately.
• Inability to determine the sex of a person.
• Inability to recognize oneself in a photo.
• Inability to distinguish objects or animals.
• Inability to recognize a place familiar.

Prospagnosia disorder can manifest in different ways. Next, we will see what the types of prospagnosia are.

Apperceptive prosopagnosia

The characteristics of people with apperceptive prosopagnosia are:

• They are not able to recognize faces.
• They cannot successfully express similar-different judgments when presented with images of different faces.
• They do not recognize attributes such as age or gender of the person with a face. However, they can recognize people based on non-facial cues such as clothing, hairstyle, or voice.

Associative prosopagnosia

People with associative prosopagnosia are characterized by the following traits:

• They identify whether photos of people’s faces are identical or different – They can deduce the age and gender of the face based on non-facial clues such as voice, hair, or even some facial feature
• They are not able to provide information about them: They cannot identify people’s traits such as their name, their job, or the last time they met them.
• These people don’t claim that “faces are meaningless,” just that they don’t look distinctive in any way.

Developmental prosopagnosia

Prosopagnosia may be a condition that an individual develops throughout life, as a result of neurological damage, or it may be a condition an individual presents from birth, despite a healthy brain, and that it maintains for the rest of life. In the first case, doctors speak of acquired prosopagnosia and, in the second case, however, they speak of congenital prosopagnosia.

Developmental prosopagnosia is thought to be a form of congenital prosopagnosia and that some people are born with a selective deficit in the recognition and the perception of faces. The cases described suggest that this form of the disorder can be highly variable and some scholars consider it hereditary.

In most cases, the causes of prosopagnosia are brain injuries that affect the right or left occipitotemporal cortex, and involve areas ranging from the anterior temporal lobe to the fusiform and lingual gyrus. From a cognitive point of view, the causes of prosopagnosia are the following:

• R upture of purely visual entities: A comparison occurs between the face the subject is observing and the structural descriptions of all known faces.
• Supramodal entities do not work: Cause multimodal recognition perturbations to not work. Information related to the facial, voice and name recognition units converges in them, which are integrated and identified as belonging to the same person.

How is prosopagnosia cured? At the moment, there is no specific treatment that can cure prosopagnosia, whether acquired or congenital in nature. According to experts, the discovery of the triggering causes and the precise neurological mechanisms that regulate face recognition could be a positive advance in the therapeutic field, especially with regard to congenital prosopagnosia.

Despite the lack of a specific therapy, prosopagnosia can be contained through remedies called compensatory strategies. The most common compensatory strategies adopted for the treatment of prosopagnosia are:

• Recognize a person by their voice.
• Recognize a person by their haircut.
• Recognize a person by their clothing.
• Recognize a person by the way they gesture or the way they walk.

The recognition methods just listed can fail when people who interact with a prosopagnosia patient change their hairstyle, change their voice due to age, change their style of dress, etc. However, for many people, compensatory strategies are very useful and allow them to have better interpersonal relationships.

This article is merely informative, at PsychologyFor we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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