Prosopagnosia Informative Speech

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Hello, today we will be talking about prosopagnosia. Prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, is a family of disorders in the ability to identify or learn faces, including one’s own face. With a prevalence rate as high as 2% and no known formal treatments, prosopagnosia can be socially frustrating. People with this deficit still have normal visual abilities such as basic object recognition, but there is some sort of impairment involving the higher, more complex visual processing areas. In the picture on the right, someone with prosopagnosia would see the individual vegetables and not be able to integrate them to form a holistic face.
There are two main types of prosopagnosia: congenital and acquired. People with congenital prosopagnosia are born with …show more content…

The Famous Faces Test studies whether test subjects can recognize famous faces. A major criticism of this test is that it assumes that certain people are famous and therefore familiar across locations and age groups. The first tests developed with non-famous face were the Cambridge Face Memory Test and the Cambridge Face Perception Test. However, they only use male, Caucasian, young adult faces, and therefore do not yield a variety of data or translate well across cultures. The Warrington Recognition Memory for Faces test is similar but less widely used because it includes hair and clothing in its images. Test subjects could base their recognition of faces on these non-facial elements. The Benton Facial Recognition Test, on the other hand, removes hair and clothes from images and includes images of faces from different angles. However, it allows test subjects to view the images for as long as they choose, which encourages cheating through …show more content…

For example, tests have shown that those with autism show higher rates of difficulty with recognizing faces. Autistic individuals also have difficulties with configural and global processing. There is a positive correlation between these types of processing and facial recognition difficulties. So, it can be more broadly stated that those with complications in global or configural processing may be more likely to have problems in recognizing faces.
On the other hand, prosopagnosia may also have a genetic basis, independent of processing deficiencies. In a study, many members of a family stated that they had difficulty recognizing faces of most of their relatives. Further tests showed that most members had trouble recognizing and perceiving faces in both the Cambridge Face Memory Test and the Cambridge Face Perception Test. These difficulties did not come from difficulties in global processing; so, a genetic basis for prosopagnosia is very

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