Symptoms
Prosopagnosia is a cognitive deficit that results in an impairment of facial recognition. This type of agnosia is sometimes referred to as face blindness. While Prosopagnosia usually extends to facial recognition, in extreme cases some people affected experience difficulty recognizing other stimuli such as physical objects (cars, animals, household objects). There are also many people who experience other forms of recognition impairment aside from facial recognition when diagnosed with prosopagnosia. These include difficulty judging age, gender, emotional expression, and most surprisingly navigational abilities.
People diagnosed with Prosopagnosia encounter many difficulties in everyday life that we sometimes take for granted. While many people, myself included, have difficulty remembering faces or names, prosopagnosics problems are more taxing then we could imagine. It’s hard to imagine forgetting the faces of people you love or have encounters with everyday. I couldn’t imagine waking up and being able to recognize my mom when she’s making breakfast. Some people with the disorder have been documented to speak to themselves in the mirror, largely because they couldn’t recognize the person they were talking to was them.
Prosopagnosics identify faces to be almost indistinguishable. A description from a patient was quoted as describing a face as “strangely flat, white with emphatic dark eyes, as if made from a flat surface, like white, oval plates, all alike”. Although prosopagnosia is a severe deficit, people develop coping mechanisms to mitigate the damage of the impairment. People diagnosed look for cues to identify people such as clothing, voice, even hairstyle to be able to distinguish people from one another. Even with cues, some prosopagnosics may become social recluses avoiding interaction. Some develop social anxiety and in the worst case scenario, depression due to the perceived embarrassment they might h...