Congenital Prosopagnosia Essay

Prosopagnosia, commonly known as “facial blindness”, is the inability to recognize identity from faces. This impairment can either be acquired following a brain injury, called acquired prosopagnosia, or developmental in nature, in which case the individuals have never developed an ability to recognize faces, also known as congenital prosopagnosia. Being able to recognize faces rapidly and accurately is crucial for distinguishing family members, friends, and colleagues from strangers and to even navigate our social environment with a sense of security. The lack of such ability can cause severe developmental, social, and occupational impairments (5). For these reasons alone, the exploration of possible rehabilitation is an urgent issue that, unfortunately, has received little attention (5). There is, however, hope in the congenital form of the impairment. Congenital Prosopagnosia is one of the keys to better understanding the ways …show more content…
So, what are the main features of congenital prosopagnosia (CP)? From the behavioral point of view, in some cases of CP, the recognition deficit is purely selective to faces, with individuals exhibiting no difficulty in visual processing tasks with other kinds of visual stimuli. The deficit can even be specific to the processing of facial identity, with a spaced ability to recognize other facial cues such as emotional expressions. In other cases of CP, however, the deficit can extend beyond the face domain and include object recognition, general configure processing, or even the perception of biological motion. Recently, an increasing number of studies has begun to not only investigate “overt face recognition in CP (i.e., the explicit ability to recognize faces) , but also “covert” face recognition (i.e., implicit processing of familiar faces that individuals claim to not