This week, the video of Elizabeth Loftus’s presentation on false memory research shows, amongst other things, how our memory for faces can be fooled. How good are you at remembering people’s faces? You might like to try this online test of memories for faces.
Prosopagnosia is an impairment in the ability to recognize faces. This can be acquired, as in the case of brain injury or disease, or genetic, developing in childhood. The inability is specific to facial recognition – the ability to recognize other objects is reasonably unimpaired. There is also evidence that the ability is further specialized to involve human faces only – some individuals with prosopagnosia can still recognize non-human animal faces. This suggests that there is a specific neural mechanism that specializes in facial recognition. The area of the brain called the fusiform gyrus appears to be responsible. People with prosopagnosia have to rely on other cues like hair, clothing, gait and so on in order to recognize people.
Normally, people are very adept at recognizing the features in human faces (not surprising given the importance of faces in our evolutionary history) and but only if they are right-side-up. Take a look at what happens when the face is upside-down!
