Brain Disorders: What Is Prosopagnosia?

Visual agnosia refers to the “…inability to recognize objects that results neither from general intellectual loss nor from a loss of basic sensory abilities,” (Anderson, 2009, p. 32). There are generally two types of visual agnosia: apperceptive agnosia and associative agnosia. Apperceptive agnosia is the inability to recognize or draw simple shapes as they are shown or represented. Associative agnosia is the ability to recognize and copy drawings of simple and complex shapes. However, person with associative agnosia are unable to recognize the complex objects (Anderson, 2009).

The apparent interaction between social setting and social recognition was revealed to be insignificant, F(1, 17) = 1.065, MSE = 16.663, p>.05. According to this data we should fail to reject our null hypothesis because we did not find any significant effects.

Prosopagnosia, also called face blindness, is a neuropsychological condition that refers to impairment in the recognition of faces. Although prosopagnosic patients suffer from other types of recognition impairments (place recognition, car recognition, facial expression of emotion, est.), they experience face recognition problems above or over other types impairments. Prosopagnosia occurs without intellectual, sensory or cognitive impairments; in other words, people with prosopagnosia can still recognize people from non-facial cues. They cannot recognize familiar people by their faces alone, and often use alternative routes to alleviate the effects of this impairment. These routes include

Imagine lacking the ability to recognize the familiar face of a loved one or spouse. Or having to rely on voices, clothing, and certain attributes of that individual in order to have some kind of knowledge on who they actually are. This condition is defined as Prosopagnosia; known as face blindness or facial agnostic. According to Barton (2008), it was first described as a consequence of cerebral damage by Quaking and Bordello in 1867. This term comes from the Greek word “face” and “lack of knowledge.” Stated by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (2007), Prosopagnosia is anticipated to be the result of damages, abnormalities, or destruction in the right fusiform gyrus; part of the brain that controls the perception of faces and the functionality of memory in the neural system. This deficit can be present from birth, the result of a stroke, a traumatic brain injury, or neurodegenerative diseases. In order to help an individual with Prosopagnosia, it is essential to develop compensatory or redeeming strategies, as well as the use of clues or attributes to help them better identify individuals.

The authors of this paper are interested in the psychological basis of the behavioural avoidance of people with facial disfigurement. Specifically, they are interested in how people respond to individuals with facial birth marks.

A face could do many things to a person and affect how people think of them and how people think of them can change how they act. Normal face or not seen every day face, you should never be judged by how you look and you don’t look like everyone else. This is shown in the very well made book “Wonder” a Novel by Raquel J. Palacio. A quote said later in the book implying that the “main” character doesn’t feel good with his face, he doesn’t mind people looking at him, but he doesn’t like it because of what people keep saying about it. The quote is “I wish every day could be halloween.

In Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he denotes a “deficit is an impairment or incapacity of neurological function; such as loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision loss of dexterity, or loss of identity” (Sacks, 1985). The specific neurological disorder that is highlighted in chapter one is Visual Agnosia, which is a deficit associated with poor primary visual processing that affects shape perception, figures, object, face and letter recognition (Serino, et al., 2014). Other subtypes of visual agnosia that also seemed to fit the descriptions that Sacks shared is prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognize human faces (Shah, 2016), and pantomime agnosia, characterized as the inability to understand gestures (Gonzalez, Mack, & Heilman, K., 1986).

In adults, three variables were used to test the other-race effect on facial recognition: orientation, face type and ethnicity. Adults at least 18 years of age and older (N = 64) were asked to recognize upright and inverted adult and infant faces. Recognition was tested using a forced-choice procedure. 4 slides were shown during a trial to make sure participants understood the instructions. Next, participants viewed 48 slides with faces alternating between adult female and infant faces; first segment each face was upright, second segment faces were inverted. The results of the study found that there was no significance between race and facial recognition. Other research conducted has shown that race does in fact have a significant effect on facial recognition.

There was a study done by Young, Hay, and Ellis (1985) that uses people with no medical issues. They asked people to keep a diary record of problems they experienced in face recognition. They found people never reported putting a name to a face while knowing nothing else about that person. This supports the model as it suggests that we cannot think of a person's name unless we know other contextual information about them.

This implies that bilateral and unilateral hippocampus does not contribute majorly to familiarity and recollection of unknown human’s faces.

This essay will talk about face recognition and several reasons why it has been studied separately. The ability to recognise faces is of huge significance of people’s daily life and differs in important ways from other forms of object recognition (Bruce and Young, 1986). Than this essay will talk about the processes involved in face recognition which comes from the diversity of research about familiar and unfamiliar faces-it includes behavioural studies, studies on brain-damaged patients, and neuroimaging studies. Finally, it will discuss how face recognition differs from the recognition of other object by involving more holistic or configuration processing and different areas of the brain (Eysenck & Keane, 2005).

Prosopagnosia is defined as the difficulty in recognizing an individuals face; it is broken down into 3 main types; Apperceptive prosopagnosia, associative prosopagnosia and developmental prosopagnosia. Perception is an important aspect when recognizing faces, without recognizing the stimulus (face) you would not be able to identify a person. Therefore the individuals who sufferer from this disorder is unable to accurately recognize a face whether that be the face of a familiar person such as a family member or close friend, the face of a famous person, or even their own face. This paper will look at prosopagnosia in greater detail, it will explain the 3 main types, as well as give insight as to why face recognition is important in our

Agnosia is defined as the inability to recognize objects through the processing of sensory information, which means there is no deficit in semantic memory or problems with naming objects. An individual suffering from agnosia still possesses all the relevant semantic information tied to a precept, but they cannot recognize the precept when it is presented to them and therefore trigger the recall of said information. There are many types of agnosia, but this essay will focus on visual object agnosia and prosopagnosia. The former is the inability to recognise objects: patients suffering from visual object agnosia do not have impaired vision, and in some cases can even copy the object they are seeing (patient H.J.A., Humphreys & Riddoch, 1987) or draw it from memory (patient D.F., Milner & Goodale, 1992), but are unable to recognize it when they see it. In the latter, prosopagnosia, patients cannot recognise faces of familiar individuals, and have to rely on other characteristics such as their voice or clothing to recognize them. Patients suffering from prosopagnosia can either acquire it through a lesion in relevant brain areas (acquired prosopagnosia) or for less understood reasons have it from birth, in which case it is termed developmental prosopagnosia. The study of patients with agnosia is integral to the field of visual recognition, as the specifics of their deficits can provide great insight into the ways our brain processes information; for example, the location of

In this essay descriptions as well as identifications of research evidence for both Bruce and Young’s 1986 cognitive model of face recognition and Burton, Bruce and Johnston’s 1990 cognitive model of face recognition; which are then applied to two separate case studies and an explanation of which better suits each shall be given. For the purposes of this essay, Bruce and Young’s 1986 model shall be theory 1, and Burton, Bruce and Johnston’s 1990 model, shall be theory 2.

Although some critiques can be made, the experiment overall was well structured and the scientists was able to gather good evidence. The authors agreed that the mechanism that is associated with the implicit recognition is different from the recognition awareness. The scientists had the participants take a forced-choice test for a second time after they had looked at the kaleidoscope images. By doing another experiment using the same technique, they are giving a variety of stimiulus that could reaffirm the correlation that they are trying to make.