People with prosopagnosia are unable to recognize faces—even the faces of people who are very familiar to them. In his interview with VPR, Bradley Duchaine, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences, explains that people who live with face blindness “fail to recognize faces that they have seen thousands of times and that are really important to them. They can fail to recognize their child when they go to pick them up from school.”
Duchaine’s research uses fMRI and electroencephalograms (EEGs) to explore how the brains of people with prosopagnosia function differently than those of normal subjects.
Listen to the full story, broadcast 2/29/12 on VPR’s Vermont Edition.