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Why Can't Some People Recognise Faces? (prosopagnosia)

Deleted User

BBC Sounds - CrowdScience (you can listen now, or download an audio file) 26 minutes programme about face blindness / difficulty  recognising faces -- experienced by 2% of the population (could there be a reason why more than a third of CrowdScience presenters experience face blindness?).

[I was interested in this programme as:

a) I once read, somewhere, that approximately 36% of Autistic adults experience face blindness,

b) I was interested to hear information from Professor Zaira Cattaneo, a neuroscientist based in Italy who researches face perception],

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct8k6t

A related paper:

Autistic adults have insight into their relative face recognition ability

Gehdu, B.K., Press, C., Gray, K.L.H. et al. Autistic adults have insight into their relative face recognition ability. Sci Rep 14, 17802 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-67649-8

Keywords: Face recognition, Twenty-item prosopagnosia index, Autism, Developmental prosopagnosia

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-67649-8

[While I don't think I have difficulty recognising people's faces, I realise some neurodivergent people do experience prosopagnosia and I was keen to better understand and be aware of what this means for their daily adult lives].

  • in reply to Cinnabar_wing

    Thank you   That was a really interesting programme from CrowdScience. How funny they had so many people with prosopagnosia presenting the program to give lived experiences! It was interesting what they were saying about it, the correlation with sight difficulties as a child, the role ASD can play, etc.

    If you couldn't see faces properly at all growing up, you might have it severely, but ASD could be slightly different, something to do with eye contact. That makes sense as you can see faces but just not comfortable with looking direct. It would be worth further study certainly, as I didn't know how much of a scale that could be.

  • Sheep can recognise up to around 50 other sheep by their faces and can differentiate between the faces of humans that they know and strangers. The wide variety of human face shapes, feature shapes and their spatial relationships is remarkable in mammals. It has been suggested that facial recognition played an important part in human evolution. In a highly social animal, reliant on sight, with a propensity for both altruism and interpersonal and intergroup violence, recognising who is who is very important.

  • in reply to Deleted User

    I'm the same, I can recognise faces but forget names unless I see them written down or with some effort.

    Sometimes people say an actors name, but I need to know what movie they've been in to know who they are talking about. (I'm not a big movie person so have to name one I have seen).

    I'm still reading the article, it's really interesting about possible implications, I think I'll listen to the show so thanks for that!

  • I am terrible at faces, on a few occasions I have actually failed to notice that we changed lecturer and when I first go to a new uni it takes me several months to start being able to tell similarish looking people apart. I've never tested whether I have true prosopagnosia, and I don't think I do because I do start to get there eventually, but it is definitely something that is a struggle for me

  • in reply to Hergé

    Same for me (I try to get people to tell me an unusual thing - niche hobby - off the beaten track holiday location - unusual claim to fame etc. ...in the hopes that little information nugget will act as a hook to reinforce my mind's filing system of "person" cross matched to "name").  It is not failure-proof - can help though.

  • It is an interesting subject. Thankfully it's not something that I've personally experienced. I'm fairly good with faces, it's remember their name that stumps me.