Although recognizing our own face is something that we do automatically, there is a small group of people that tend to fail in recognizing themselves, and these individuals suffer from a condition known as acquired prosopagnosia (AP). Basically, sufferers are unable to recognize the faces they see, even their own. This condition most often occurs after a violent trauma to the head, and researchers are still struggling to understand it fully, AlphaGalileo reports.
According to a paper published in the latest issue of the respected scientific journal Cortex, this condition may be tightly linked to the sufferers’ inability to process faces as a whole (holistically). In previous investigations, it was demonstrated that people suffering from the condition had difficulties in analyzing the region around the eyes on the face of people they saw. Others experienced a distorted perception of distances between facial features, but the new work is the first to tie the two together. Furthermore, the Cortex study also showed that these were not causes, but symptoms, of the inability to look at faces holistically.
The work revealed that people suffering from AP are unable to process several features of the face in parallel, and that this is one of the main reasons why even faces of people in their families appear as strange to them.
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