Harvard Study: Face Blindness is More Common Than You Think

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and VA Boston Healthcare System did a study on people with face blindness. They found out that it is much more common than previously thought. Even people who had slightly different diagnosing criteria for face blindness showed similar performance in recognizing faces. This suggests that the diagnostic criteria should be expanded so that more people can get help for this condition.

1 out of 33 people may have face blindness. For 1 out of 108 individuals, this can be serious but milder cases occur in nearly 1 in 47 people. Face blindness is a very mysterious problem that makes people think they already know people who they’ve never met and not remembering the faces of people who are close to them. It’s estimated that around 2-2.5% of the entire world population has it.

A new study shows that a disorder called face blindness may be more common than previously thought. This is according to researchers from Harvard Medical School and the VA Boston Healthcare System. The study was published in the journal Cortex and it found out that as many as one in 33 people (3.08 percent) might have face blindness, which means about 10 million Americans.

Scientists conducted a study that showed people with prosopagnosia (a disorder where people have difficulty recognizing faces) had the same performance when tested using different criteria. This means that more inclusive criteria should be used to diagnose this disorder, which could help millions of people who may not even know they have it get a diagnosis and better understanding of their condition.

A recent research, conducted by Joseph DeGutis from the VA Boston psychiatry department, shows that ‘face blindness’ may be mild or severe depending on the person, and suggests a way of testing it. This is outlined in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM5).

The study looked at 3,341 people and asked them if they have trouble recognizing faces in their everyday lives. Then the researchers gave two tests to make sure they had difficulty learning new faces or recognizing well-known, famous faces.

From the research, only 31 out of 3,341 people were found to have major difficulty recognizing faces while 72 had a milder form. There weren’t really two big distinct groups with poor or well-recognizing face skills. It looks like it varies and lies on a line instead.

Finally, the researchers compared how well people with a condition called prosopagnosia could match faces. Prosopagnosia is sometimes referred to as face blindness. The results showed that stricter criteria for diagnosing this condition did not give slower scores in matching faces. Harvard Medicine News spoke with DeGutis, the lead researcher of the study, about what causes face blindness.

Prosopagnosia is a condition where you can’t recognize people’s faces, and it happens to about 1 in 30,000 people in the United States due to brain injury. Another type of Prosopagnosia is caused by genetics or other things, and that affects about 1 out every 33 people.

HMNews: Why is it important to understand this condition, even though some people might not see it as a serious health disorder?

DeGutis: It’s really important because Face Blindness can be very socially difficult and limit job options. People with this condition have a hard time networking and that often leads to embarrassment and sadness. Saying hello to someone is a way of letting them know they are valued.

Prosopagnosia is something that can affect people, even those on the autism spectrum and older folks too. These days, because of how much more people are alone and not spending time with others, it’s super important to foster meaningful relationships and be able to recognize each other’s faces. I’m really interested in this research – what intrigues me most is understanding how our brain sees and remembers faces.

Face blindness is really interesting because humans have an amazing ability to recognize people’s faces. This ability uses three things: seeing a face as one complete piece, remembering someone’s face and facts about them, and lastly, special parts in the brain that take care of facial recognition.

Our research on how well people recognize faces provides us with an understanding of why sometimes it doesn’t work for some people. It even gives us clues on how to help people who can’t remember faces very easily. Lastly, it is interesting to figure out what exactly these people with face blindness see when looking at a face or think about someone they know.

HMNews: What is so important that your new discoveries suggest?

Many people who have difficulty recognizing faces in their everyday lives may have been wrongly said they don’t have prosopagnosia. This is really important because knowing that you actually do have it (even if it’s a mild form) can help you find strategies to reduce its negative impacts on your life. This can involve telling the people around you or seeking treatment.

New research suggests that people who don’t recognize faces very well may gain a bigger benefit from certain treatments than people who have a more serious issue with their face recognition. These treatments could include special brain training that helps improve their ability to tell one face from another, or courses aimed at teaching them how to remember different people’s faces.

As you get older, it’s harder to recognize people by their faces. It can be even more difficult if you have something called “mild prosopagnosia”. Paying attention to this may help you avoid further confusion when trying to remember someone’s face.

We can learn something important from the way prosopagnosia is studied. In the past 13 years, some researchers have made it difficult to diagnose this condition while others make it much easier. But it turns out that these two groups are measuring the same thing – mild and severe versions of Prosopagnosia. So now, we should broaden our criteria for diagnosing Prosopagnosia to include people with its milder forms too.

It is important to use a combination of your own words and proven tests when diagnosing prosopagnosia. It can be difficult to know what you can do by only asking yourself, but also if you just rely on tests in a lab, those results may not show how you do in everyday life.

This study was funded by the National Eye Institute and is written by Joseph DeGutis, Kanisha Bahierathan, Katherine Barahona, EunMyoung Lee, Travis Evans, Hye Min Shin, Maruti Mishra, Jirapat Likitlersuang and Jeremy Wilmer. It was published in Cortex on 4 February 2023. The authors have not mentioned anything about their relationships with any companies. The research looks into how common developmental prosopagnosia is.

Reference: “What is the prevalence of developmental prosopagnosia? An empirical assessment of different diagnostic cutoffs” by Joseph DeGutis, Kanisha Bahierathan, Katherine Barahona, EunMyoung Lee, Travis Evans, Hye Min Shin, Maruti Mishra, Jirapat Likitlersuang and Jeremy Wilmer, 4 February 2023, Cortex.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2022.12.014