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

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].

Parents
  • 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.

Reply
  • 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.

Children
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