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Synonyms

Face blindness or facial agnosia

Definition

The term prosopagnosia is derived from the Greek word prosopon, meaning “face” and the Greek word agnosia which means “without knowledge.” Prosopagnosia is a deficit in the ability to recognize faces. This disorder is one type of visual agnosia, characterized by deficits in visual perception while still having normal vision; the afflicted individuals are not blind or often not greatly visually impaired in any usual sense of these conditions. Yet individuals with visual agnosia cannot visually recognize familiar objects, [6]. Individuals with prosopagnosia cannot recognize familiar faces or even their own face in a mirror or a photograph. Individuals with this facial agnosia must “know” who they are seeing in the mirror but have difficulty accepting the fact that they cannot recognize their own face. Kolb and Whishaw [4] describe a case of a woman who only became fully cognizant of her disorder when she was “introduced” to her...

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References

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  5. Grand, L., Cooper, P. A., Mondloch, C. J., Lewis, T. L., Sagiv, N., de Gelder, B., et al. (2006). What aspects of face processing are impaired in developmental prosopagnosia? Brain and Cognition, 61, 139–158.

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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Phelps, B.I. (2011). Prosopagnosia. In: Goldstein, S., Naglieri, J.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Child Behavior and Development. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-79061-9_2276

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-79061-9_2276

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-387-77579-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-387-79061-9

  • eBook Packages: Behavioral Science

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