Posted by Louise on July 20, 1999, at 16:47:53
In reply to Prosopognosia, posted by Gail on July 2, 1999, at 10:02:51
> Hi,
>
> My husband was recently diagnosed with Prosopognosia, a visual memory loss referring to faces and situations. I am looking for more information or data on this topic. Does anyone out there have any more information on: causes of this?, treatment plans? more definitions, articles on this?Hi Gail
I'm came across prosopagnosia when studying for my psychology degree (still studying!).
There's a book called "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" by Oliver Sacks which has chapters on various neurological disorders, including this.
The other info is mainly from a Biopsychology text.......Patients with the disorder apparently have difficulty telling one human face from another and in extreme cases cannot recognise their own face in the mirror. However, sufferers can recognise faces as faces and can identify face components (eyes, ears etc.)
The problem appears to happen at a conscious level as skin conduction tests have shown that recognition does occur at other levels of the nervous system.
One theory is of damage to an area of the visual cortex that involves recognition of faces (this is if you follow the views of cognitive scientists that the face is a different type of stimuli for object recognition than for any other object).
I don't know much about the situational stuff, but if your husband has a problem with faces, presuming that he can recognise a face as a face, he can also presumably recognise other objects for what they are. To see whether the problem extends further than face recognition, can he recognise not just e.g. a chair, a camera, a dog, but WHICH chair, camera, dog etc.?
If this is the problem (as has been for other reported sufferers), then a better description of prosopagnosia would be a deficit in distinguishing similar members of complex classes of visual stimuli.
The theory of brain damage of some sort as a cause has been backed up by research with monkeys, which found that monkeys had some neurons specifically in the temporal cortex which responded selectively to faces.
I don't know anything about treatment, just that this is very rare and a bit of a wonder in the realm of neuroscience and psychology as a whole.
There migh be something else I can find out; if so I'll post a further message. I hope this helps.
Louise.
>
> Thanks for your help.
>
> Gail
poster:Louise
thread:8140
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/19990628/msgs/8988.html