Face-blindness open day held at Birkbeck

Prosopagnosia – or face-blindness – was the subject of an open day held at the College on 20 September 2011, organised by a team from the Department of Psychological Sciences.

Famous prosopagnosia sufferers include the journalist Mary Ann Sieghart, Duncan Bannatyne of Dragon’s Den, and Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author of The Man Who mistook His Wife for a Hat.

The condition affects people’s ability to recognise faces – whether their own, or those of family members – in the mirror. In a few rare cases face-blindness is the result of brain damage caused by an accident or a stroke, but most sufferers (an estimated 2% of the population) have the 'developmental' form, where it typically emerges at an early age, and without any visible brain abnormality or damage.

Researchers presenting at the lecture discussed the latest neuroscientific insights into our ability to recognise and perceive faces, and described how this ability is impaired in face-blindness. Professor Martin Eimer of Birkbeck’s Brain and Behaviour Lab commented: 'Initially research was focused on acquired face-blindness, which is caused by brain damage, but over recent years it has become apparent that developmental face-blindness is far more common than we initially realised. As these people have never had normal face recognition abilities, they often don’t realise that they have a condition and are not diagnosed until they are teenagers or adults. Our research is trying to understand how the brain processes information about faces, and which aspects of face perception or face recognition are impaired in individuals with face-blindness.'

Jo Livingston was 60 before her inability to recognise faces was diagnosed as face-blindness. Jo said: 'I look at my daughter or at pictures of my husband, and I don’t recognise them. Over the years you develop strategies to help you identify people, like where a particular colleague sits in the office, or their hair, or how they walk, but inevitably there are situations where these strategies don’t work, and it can be upsetting and awkward when you can’t work out who it is you’re talking to, or mistake them for someone else.'

Professor Eimer said afterwards: 'This event was the biggest gathering of people with face-blindness that there has been to date, with one delegate flying in from the States for the event. People affected by face-blindness are very keen to increase recognition of the condition, and they also want to understand better which aspects of their face processing are specifically impaired. Our current research results that I presented on the Open Day have identified visual face memory as a critical factor in face-blindness. We are currently conducting new experiments that will enable us to gain further insights into the underlying brain processes.'

Issued: 26 October 2011