Prosopagnosia

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Classification according to ICD-10
R41.8, R44.8 Agnosia
ICD-10 online (WHO version 2019)

Prosopagnosia [ˈpʁozoːpˌagnoˈziː] (from ancient Greek τὸ πρόσωπον tò prósōpon “the face” and ἡ ἀγνωσία hē agnōsía “not recognizing”), facial recognition weakness or facial blindness describes the inability to recognize the identity of a known person based on their face. So it is a form of visual agnosia .

Disease picture and types

The clinical picture was first described in 1947 by the German neurologist Joachim Bodamer . He reported on three patients who were unable to recognize the nursing staff (and sometimes their own relatives) after a brain injury. Bodamer coined the term prosopagnosia for the term .

This article or section needs revision:
What characterizes each of the three types? Are they disjoint or can the first two be innate or acquired at the same time?
Please help to improve it , and then remove this flag.

Prosopagnosia is divided into three types:

root cause

Injuries in the ventral path between the occipital and temporal lobes , e.g. A stroke or accident, for example , can cause prosopagnosia. The fusiform gyrus , whose Fusiform Face Area (FFA) - especially on the right side of the body - is involved in the recognition of faces, is located in this area. Forms of prosopagnosia can also be inherited. However, the genetic cause of the disease is still unknown.

frequency

In a study in 2005 in the Münster area of 689 schoolchildren and students, a prevalence of 2.47% (17 of 689) of the hereditary form was found.

Dealing with the disease

Replacement identifiers

Prosopagnostics can easily recognize individual features of the face and in some cases also recognize people based on individual facial features such as eyelashes or the position of the teeth. Other features such as voice, hands, gait, special clothing or hairstyles are also used to identify people. Depending on the type of prosopagnosia, those affected can deduce different information from faces. Almost all children with prosopagnosia unconsciously develop strategies to deal with the disorder: recognizing people by voice, clothing habits, stature, movement.

Apperceptive prosopagnostics cannot determine age and gender from the face, and they also find it difficult to recognize emotions. Furthermore, they are not able to make equal-different judgments about faces.

Associative prosopagnostics can make equal-different judgments, recognize age and gender. They cannot call up semantic information (e.g. who is the person or what profession the person has), just as they cannot call up apperceptive prosopagnostics. The services that congenital prosopagnostics are capable of are significantly more variable.

Congenital prosopagnosists, i.e. people with congenital prosopagnosia, do not need to be aware that they have prosopagnosia, as this fact is difficult to believe. For comparison: in the vast majority of cases, a child who is red-green blind will not suddenly come to the realization that all the people around them can distinguish certain colors which they themselves cannot see any difference. Rather, the child will appear slightly confused when it comes to assigning colors, but very soon they will simply know by heart that adults expect them to answer the question about the color of the lawn with “green”, that the upper light of a traffic light is “red” and so on If almost all red-green blind people today know about this blindness, it is due to the preventive medical check-ups for children, which are routinely searched for. Congenital prosopagnosia, on the other hand, is completely unknown even to most doctors.

Diagnosis and treatment

Prosopagnostic children benefit greatly from early diagnosis as it allows caregivers to help them develop these strategies. There is no known treatment of congenital prosopagnosia itself.

Differentiation from autism and Asperger's syndrome

The symptoms, when manifested, can easily be confused with autism and Asperger's syndrome , and also very often occurs as a comorbidity in autism.

Effect on fellow human beings

People with prosopagnosia are often misunderstood by others as indifferent, absent-minded, arrogant and anti-social.

See also

literature

  • M. Behrmann, G. Avidan: Congenital Prosopagnosia: face-blind from birth. In: Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 9, 2005, pp. 180-187.
  • T. Grüter, M. Grüter: Prosopagnosia in Biographies and Autobiographies. In: Perception. 36, 2007, pp. 299–301, full text (PDF; 79 kB).
  • T. Grüter, M. Grüter, CC Carbon: Neural and genetic foundations of face recognition and prosopagnosia. In: Journal of Neuropsychology. 2, 2008, pp. 79-97, PMID 19334306 .
  • H. Toghi, K. Watanabe, H. Takahashi, H. Yonezawa, K. Hatano, T. Sasaki: Prosopagnosia without topographagnosia and object agnosia associated with a lesion confined to the right occipitotemporal region. In: Journal of Neurology. 248, Jul 1994, pp. 470-474, PMID 7964914 .
  • Martina Grüter: The Genetics of Congenital Prosopagnosia. (PDF) Dissertation . University of Münster , 2004, accessed on May 11, 2017 .
  • Gerald Traufetter: World full of strangers . In: Der Spiegel . No. 24 , 2003 ( online ).
  • Dela Kienle: Do we know each other? A face-blind family and their somewhat different everyday life, in: Nido 2/2013, pp. 30–33.

Web links

Wiktionary: Prosopagnosia  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

research

Documentation

Pages from and for those affected, experience reports

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ M. Grueter, T. Grueter, V. Bell, J. Horst, W. Laskowski, K. Sperling, PW Halligan, HD Ellis, I. Kennerknecht: Hereditary prosopagnosia: the first case series. In: Cortex. 43 (6), Aug 2007, pp. 734-749. PMID 17710825 .
  2. ↑ What faces reveal. In: Quarks & Co . March 13, 2012, 9:00 p.m., WDR
  3. ^ I. Kennerknecht, T. Grueter, B. Welling, S. Wentzek, J. Horst, S. Edwards, M. Grueter: First report of prevalence of non-syndromic hereditary prosopagnosia (HPA). (PDF) In: Am J Med Genet. Part A 140A. 2006, pp. 1617-1622, doi: 10.1002 / ajmg.a.31343 , PMID 16817175 .
  4. ↑ Volker Faust : Flyer Mental Health 146: Facial Blindness (Prosopagnosia) . Foundation Liebenau, Mensch - Medizin - Wirtschaft, Meckenbeuren-Liebenau, 2019. (Facial blindness in everyday life).
  5. ↑ Volker Faust : Liebenauer health information. Mental health. Psychiatric and neurological information offered by the Liebenau Foundation. With the collaboration of Walter Fröscher and Günter Hole and the Psychosocial Health Working Group. Liebenau Foundation. Volume 26 (Workplace and mental disorders, overstimulation, facial blindness (prosopagnosia)), Liebenau, autumn 2019. p. 22.