Researchers at Harvard University ran a large study with 3,100 American adults, ages 18 to 55. The results of the face-recognition tests surprised the team.
Face blindness, or prosopagnosia, is a cognitive disorder in which a person cannot recognize familiar faces. This impairment in visual memory does not affect the ability to recognize objects.
Previous estimates put prevalence at about 2% worldwide. The new data suggest the number of affected people is higher.
Approximately 10 million Americans May Suffer from Prosopagnosia
When we look at a familiar face, the brain takes less than half a second to match the eyes, nose, mouth, and chin and recognize the person.
This quick pattern-matching is something most people experience. But not everyone has that ability.
Some people live with prosopagnosia, a condition where familiar faces seem unfamiliar — while strangers can look painfully familiar.
As more people reported their struggles on social media, U.S. scientists decided to investigate how many people live with the disorder.
More than half of people who say they have prosopagnosia don’t meet strict diagnostic criteria; those cases are considered mild. The researchers paid particular attention to mild cases in the new study.
After testing volunteers on face-recognition tasks, the researchers found that 3.3% of the participants met criteria for face blindness. That group included 31 people with clear prosopagnosia and 72 people with mild prosopagnosia. Scaled to the U.S. population, that suggests roughly 10 million Americans could be affected.
The researchers say experts should pay more attention to people with mild prosopagnosia instead of focusing only on severe cases. That shift could help people with mild symptoms get faster, more effective support for the condition’s impact on daily life. Joseph DeGutis of Harvard Medical School says it would help people seek specialist care sooner and avoid dealing with the problem alone.
The team now aims to find out whether training and cognitive therapy can reduce symptoms in people with mild forms of the disorder. The study was published in the journal Cortex and is available on ScienceDirect.
