Cog News has an article about new research on the incidence of face blindness.
"Until a few years ago, only 100 cases of prosopagnosia had been documented worldwide, but it now appears the condition is much less rare than had previously been assumed," says Nakayama, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Testing of 1,600 individuals found that 2 percent of the general public may have face-blindness and a German group has recently made a similar estimate. It's conceivable that millions of people may have symptoms consistent with prosopagnosia, without even realizing it."
People with face blindness have difficulty recalling individual faces, even when they have no trouble distinguishing between, say, two different cars or boats.
For more on face perception, see our articles on the subject.
Update: Razib at GNXP is skeptical of the 2 percent figure.
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I tend to agree with Razib that the 2% figure is high; however, it might be more understandable if further testing were to prove that a large percentage of those lacking face recognition compensate for it with better than expected voice recognition.
This is something I wanted to ask you for a long time...
Even without prosopagnosia, it is not easy to remember faces. Not recognize - that's easy - but remember, i.e, call up the mental image of the face in the absence of that person. This is especially hard if you have met the person only once or twice, or if you have not seen the person for a long time, or if you have no emotional attachment to the person. Is it just me, or is that statement generally correct?
Then, is it possible to make recalling a face easier by consciously paying attention to the features of a face you are trying to remember later? If you notice the eye-color, the hairsttyle, any dimples or creases, etc. while watching the face, does that make it easier to mentally recall the face later?
Chezjake,
I'm not sure it's necessarily too high -- as you pointed out, people might compensate with voice recognition. And there are dozens of other ways to recognize individuals. We can even recognize close friends through point-light displays of their gait. And there are certainly plenty of ways to get along in the world without recognizing faces -- many jobs don't reallly require it. We don't all have to be waiters, teachers, or salespeople.
Coturnix,
Face recognition is primarily configural, rather than feature based. So if you moved my eyes a bit closer together, I'd look like a different person. Remembering eye color or whether I have a scar doesn't have much to do with it.
I don't know if the figure should really be 2%, but I can attest to what it's like to have to compensate for deficits in this area. I clearly don't have full-on prosopagnosia because I can process facial features properly on the spot and can readily recognize people I know well / see often, but I definitely struggle with facial recognition tasks way out of proportion to how well I handle other visual and related sensory tasks. (I have very good memory overall, and quite good visual memory/skills--95th-plus percentile spatial rotation/transformation ability, directions are map images, phone numbers are remembering my hand movement patterns over the keypad, etc. FWIW, I'm also slightly synesthetic in some idiosyncratic contexts, have mild OCD, and scattered signs that suggest mild Asperger's although I've never been diagnosed.)
Since I was very small I had difficulty recognizing unfamiliar but previously encountered people, a problem that has only worsened as I've aged (I'm nearly 42 now). I use all kinds of tricks to figure out, or to confirm, whom I'm dealing with at the moment: tone of voice, facial idiosyncrasies like scars and moles, typical clothing, surreptitious conversational priming to elicit corroborating information, and so on. For recall, things also get easier if I can think of a specific situation when I encountered that person--that can make an otherwise cloudy face memory snap into place (often) or at least come into much better focus.
I can definitely imagine that for people who are slightly better off than I am, this kind of processing might happen quickly/nonconsciously enough so that they don't realize that's what they're doing. I'm definitely functional enough to get along but it was only after I learned there was such a thing as "prosopagnosia" that maybe I wasn't up to baseline in this area--I just assumed I didn't pay enough attention, etc. So the 2% is believable if there are lots of people like me who don't know how to think about the face recognition skillset, or compensations thereto.
As for recall of people's faces, it seems as though people's faces tend to blend into each other in my memory, so that when I try to remember X I get Y instead, or some resonance structure that's oscillating in the (X,Y, etc) feature space. The way this feels subjectively, like I've got too much detail that I can't sort out effectively (in the same way that I have enough well-digested detail to, say, more or less redraw the map of lower Manhattan from memory) has led me to speculate that my problem might be one of dissolving facial features too much into discrete features without being able to gestalt them back into meaningful wholes, rather than not being able to process them at all. Given the points above regarding the configural processing of face information, I could definitely imagine that, but perhaps I'm missing something.
I especially have this effect when attempting to recognize various celebrities, whether male or female--if I can't get them from their voices or whatever, many times I don't even get the "feel" of them becoming abruptly more recognizable in a backfilling way even after I'm told who they are, as I might with folks with whom I've directly interacted. A good example is Gwyneth Paltrow, just another conventionally attractive thin blond 30something who presents me with no memorable idiosyncrasies at all, and whose face doesn't even make it up to the level of getting confused with someone else's as described above. An hour after I've seen her on some program, I probably couldn't pick her out again without a great deal of effort. On the other hand, I don't really have any trouble remembering the appearance of my girlfriend from 25 years ago (or at least I don't think I do), because she was not cookie-cutter in appearance, and I have plenty of interactional scenarios to act as cues. But now I feel myself drifting into the idea of whether attractiveness issues play a role in the facial gestalting process, and maybe that's for some other discussion...
--pr
prismatic, so prismatic-- what you wrote about your experiences with a certain type of face blindness really resonated with me. I recognize people I've met many times or have an actual relationship with no trouble, generally. But people I've met just a few times don't seem to register, unless they have some really distinguishing trait. If they're very "regular" looking, chances are I'll forget who they are, even if they live two or three houses down the street. It's very awkward and sometimes I don't look around very much because I'm afraid of running into someone I should know, but don't. I have had many conversations with people where I've just faked my way through. It's mortifying to think about it. Now that I'm older, I'm trying to train myself to say, "I'm really sorry, please don't take this personally, but I"ve forgotten your name." Of course, this isn't nearly the whole truth which would be more like, "Excuse me, but I've completely forgotten who you are because your face doesn't register." I have a good spatial memory, a good "spelling" memory-- how words look when they're spelled correctly or incorrectly-- and a good memory for music-- I can play a tune after hearing it once or twice, something I used to think anyone could do. Also, I draw for a living, so I have a good visual memory in some ways. Lastly, my husband, who is a writer, has a TERRIBLE ear for pronounciation. But he has TREMENDOUS face recognition. I still remember walking down the street in Manhattan with him and passing some guy, when he said, "That's the guy who used to work at the coffee shop I always used to go to EIGHT YEARS AGO." Anyway, thanks for writing about your experience with this weird thing. This is my first post to Scienceblogs by the way.