Prosopagnosia: What Do They See? What do people with prosopagnosia see?

Prosopagnosia, commonly known as face blindness, is a cognitive disorder of face perception in which the ability to recognize familiar faces, and to the extreme, including one’s own face (self-recognition), is impaired.

But other aspects of visual processing (e.g., object discrimination) and intellectual functioning (e.g., decision-making) remain intact.

Prosopagnosia can result from stroke or brain injury, or appear at birth as a genetic condition. NIH said children born with prosopagnosia “never had a time when they could recognize faces.”

The difficulty with facial recognition can manifest in a number of ways including; poor recognition of familiar individuals in person or in photographs and an inability to describe faces.

What do people with prosopagnosia see? People with face blindness have normal visual acuity.

This simply means that they are not blind and are able to differentiate between shades of colors, identify patterns, and see in 3D as well. They do not have any problems with memory or comprehension and have normal intelligence.

People with prosopagnosia do not have problems with sight. However, they are just not able to figure out the faces of people they meet.