Prosopagnosia what is, symptoms, types, causes and treatment

We have all lived situations in which we forget the faces of some people, or confuse them; Sometimes we even think we know people we have never met before. ¿The result? A particularly embarrassing situation.

As in different cognitive skills, even in the recognition of faces there are individual differences by which some people are better than others. However, when someone has particular problems in the ability to recognize faces despite a general normal cognitive functioning, the condition is described as prosopagnosia, or "blindness for faces". In this Psychology-online article, we will see this condition together, to better understand What is Prosopagnosia, its symptoms, types, causes and possible treatments.

1. What is Prosopagnosia
2. Prosopagnosia symptoms
3. Types of Prosopagnosia
4. Causes of Prosopagnosia
5. Prosopagnosia treatment

What is Prosopagnosia

People are equipped with a brain structure capable of identifying the most distinctive social stimulus of a person's identity: face. In the first years of his life, this powerful source of information has the following functions:

• Recognize their parents and interact with them.
• Establish social relationships.
• Influence the elections of others, how to make a partner or in the realization of the professional career.

When this recognition system fails, we talk about Prosopagnosia, a perceptual deficit, acquired or congenital, of the central nervous system which prevents those affected with recognizing the whole features of people's faces. It can occur purely or associated with visual agnosia.

Bodamer in 1947 was the first to give a definition of Prosopagnosia, with reference to the inability to recognize family faces, keeping intact the ability to combine unknown faces and perceive facial expressions. Initially, Prosopagnosia was considered an acquired deficiency, derived from brain injuries, although today it is known that it is a disorder that can be present from birth, In the absence of damages suffered.

Prosopagnosia symptoms

A person with Prosopagnosia does not recognize any face, from the own to a close member of the family or a person with whom he interacts daily. The inability to recognize faces, induced by Prosopagnosia, It has several consequences For those affected. Let's see what are the symptoms of Prosopagnosia:

• Social phobia.
• Difficulties in establishing relationships solid interpersonal with family or friends.
• Difficulties to establish new interpersonal relationships.
• Relationship problems in school/labor.
• Moments of depression due to social relationship difficulties.
• Inability to recognize facial expressions.
• Inability to estimate age of a person, even approximately.
• Inability to determine the sex of a person.
• Inability to recognize yourself In a photo.
• Inability to distinguish objects or animals.
• Inability to recognize a place familiar.

Types of Prosopagnosia

Prospagnosia disorder can manifest in different ways. Next, we will see what are the types of prospagnosia.

Apoeceptive Prosopagnosia

The characteristics of people with apostceptive prosopagnosia are:

• They are not able to recognize faces.
• They cannot successfully express judgments of the similar-different type, When images of different faces are presented.
• They do not recognize attributes such as age or gender of the person with face. However, they can recognize people based on non -facial tracks such as clothes, hairstyle or voice.

Associative Prosopagnosia

People with associative prosopagnosia are characterized by the following traits:

• Identify whether photos of people's faces are identical or different: They can deduce the age and genre of the face based on non -facial clues such as voice, hair or even some characteristic of the face
• They are not able to provide information about them: They cannot identify features of people as their name, their job or the last time they knew them.
• These people do not claim that "faces make no sense", just do not seem distinctive in any way.

Prosopagnosia of development

Prosopagnosia can be a condition that an individual develops throughout life, as a result of neurological damage, or can be a condition presents an individual from birth, Despite a healthy brain, and that maintains during the rest of life. In the first case, doctors speak of acquired prosapagnosia and, in the second case, on the other hand, they speak of congenital prosopagnosia.

It is believed that development Prosopagnosia is a form of congenital prosapagnosia and that some people are born with a selective deficit In recognition and the perception of faces. The described cases suggest that this form of disorder can be very variable and some scholars consider it inheritance.

Causes of Prosopagnosia

In most cases, the causes of prosopagnosia are brain injuries that affect the right or left occipitotempoTal cortex, and involve areas ranging from the anterior temporal lobe to the fusiform and lingual turn. From a cognitive point of view, the causes of Prosopagnosia are the following:

• RUpning of purely visual entities: There is a comparison between the face that the subject is observing and the structural descriptions of all known faces.
• Supramodal entites do not work: They cause multimodal recognition disturbances not to work. In them, information related to facial, voice and name recognition units, which are integrated and identified as belonging to the same person.

Prosopagnosia treatment

¿How Prosopagnosia is cured? At the moment, There is no specific treatment that can cure prosapagnosia, either of an acquired or congenital nature. According to experts, the discovery of the trigger causes, and of the precise neurological mechanisms that regulate the recognition of faces, could be a positive advance in the therapeutic field, especially in regard to congenital prosopagnosia.

Despite the lack of specific therapy, Prosopagnosia can be contained through remedies called compensatory strategies. The most common compensatory strategies adopted for the treatment of Prosopagnosia are:

• Recognize a person for his voice.
• Recognize a person for their haircut.
• Recognize a person for their clothing.
• Recognize a person for the way of gesturing or for the way of walking.

The recognition methods just listed can fail when people who relate to a prosopagnosia patient change hairsty. However, for many people, compensatory strategies are very useful and allow them to have better interpersonal relationships.

This article is merely informative, in psychology-online we have no power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to Prosopagnosia: What is, symptoms, types, causes and treatment, We recommend that you enter our clinical psychology category.