Face blindness runs in families
The genetic basis of a distressing neurological condition that prevents people from recognising faces has been pinned down. The finding may help people cope with the impairment, which the researchers believe may affect 1 in 50 people from birth. Face blindness runs in families * From New Scientist The genetic basis of a distressing neurological […]
The genetic basis of a distressing neurological condition that prevents people from recognising faces has been pinned down. The finding may help people cope with the impairment, which the researchers believe may affect 1 in 50 people from birth.
Face blindness runs in families
* From New Scientist
The genetic basis of a distressing neurological condition that prevents people from recognising faces has been pinned down. The finding may help people cope with the impairment, which the researchers believe may affect 1 in 50 people from birth.
People with prosopagnosia, or face blindness, cannot easily tell faces apart, even if they belong to people they know well, and so often see their friends and family as strangers. The condition is usually associated with brain damage, for example from a stroke, but numerous anecdotal reports have suggested that it also runs in families.
Now a team led by Thomas Grüter at the Institute for Human Genetics in Münster, Germany, who is a prosopagnosic himself, has found concrete evidence of its genetic basis. “I realised I had prosopagnosia quite early on in school,” Grüter says. He has trouble recognising faces of people he knows and sometimes thinks he recognises strangers.
Full story at New Scientist
_/_/_/_/ SCR comment:
Prosopagnosia is an impairment in the recognition of faces. Here are some links to different sites on prosopagnosia. These cases are often taken into account for a specialised module for face processing in the brain, the Fusiform Face Area (FFA). One of the most known proponents of this view is Prof. Nancy Kanwisher. Another view claims that the FFA is not specifically for faces alone, but for specialised visual processing. One of the proponents of this view is Prof. Isabel Gauthier. Kanwisher and Gauthier contribut to one of the more heated discussions these days in cognitive neuroscience.
Prof. Nancy Kanwisher
- Selected article: Domain specificity in face perception (2000)
- Selected article: Can face recognition really be dissociated from object recognition? (1999)
Wikipedia – prosopagnosia
Wikipedia – face perception
Cecilia Burman (sufferer of prosopagnosia)
Bill Choisser (sufferer of prosopagnosia)
[http://www.faceblind.org|Prosopagnosia Research Center}
