14 DAY TRIAL // The new workmate does not say "Hallo" on his/her first, second and third day at the office. You might say he/she is arrogant, shy or, in most cases, sociopath. But what if he/she cannot remember your face? This is really the case of prosopamnesia, a rare neural condition, detected so far in a handful of people around the world. Now, it has been found that an Australian woman also has it.
"For many years, scientists have been interested in how people learn to recognize new faces, and people who have difficulty with faces often have trouble interacting in social settings," said Professor Jason Mattingley, cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Queensland, who leads the investigation with researchers at Macquarie and La Trobe universities. The woman visited the researchers after experiencing social embarrassment when she realized she could not recognize workmates to whom she had already been introduced.
It appears that the woman's "disability" is determined by her inability to recognize new faces, rather than her capacity to perceive them.
"She reports relying heavily on featural cues such as hair color and style, eyeglasses, and eyebrows to recognize new acquaintances," said Mattingley.
After completing an array of standard face-recognition tests, the woman clearly appeared to have a severely impaired ability to recognize new faces. This disability impedes her to recognize characters on television and only after months of repeated viewing she could slowly learn to identify the main characters.
When she looked at 42 images of pre-nominated movie celebrities, she correctly recognized nine-out-of-10 of the faces, but only after six months of testing.
Brain-imaging investigations revealed that the woman's exposure to a new face, even over 'multiple encoding episodes', was not enough to inflict a lasting memory.
"It may be that enduring face representations are slow to form or are degraded in quality, or they may decay rapidly following normal encoding," said Mattingley.
Face recognition is believed to be a hereditary skill, but which can be trained by experience.
"Prosopamnesia is probably a condition linked to an irregularity during neural development," explained Mattingley.
It was found that the members of the woman's family experience similar issues with face memory.
"If this is true, this woman's condition might present us with tantalizing evidence for a genetic link as well," added Mattingley.