Face Blindness - Prosopagnosia

Faces are of utmost importance for human social life. They provide valuable information about the identity, expression, gaze, health and age of a person. Recent face processing models assume highly interconnected neural structures between different temporal, occipital, and frontal brain areas with several feedback loops. A selective deficit in the visual learning and recognition of faces is known as prosopagnosia, which can be found both in acquired and congenital form. Any neural tissue damage in the face recognition network of the brain can cause a prosopagnosia, a condition which can best be defined as a selective impairment of the visual learning and recognition of faces. Recently, a hereditary sub-type of congenital prosopagnosia with a very high prevalence rate of 2.5% has been identified.