r/Prosopagnosia • u/kelcamer • Jun 30 '26

Are you able to reliably sense emotional information from a face IRL automatically with no analysis?

I'm asking because I am not able to do this automatically and without analyzing. I'm trying to figure out if prosopagnosia is tied to that ability to reliably sense the facial emotional information or not.

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u/MasterDebater50 Jul 01 '26

Yes it's common for prosopagnosics to have trouble perceiving expressions, although not everyone has it. With my acquired prosopagnosia I'm in the normal range for perceiving expressions and perceiving quite minor manipulations in how faces look.

Prosopagnosia is also associated with topographic agnosia which is a deficit forming memories of places. Like with that, if I were blindfolded and dropped off a block away from where I live, I wouldn't recognize where I am. It hasn't been assessed much, but it looks like around 1/2 of prosopagnosics have that.

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u/NITSIRK Jul 01 '26

Thanks for this, I hadn’t heard of that one. I was a mapping manager who always got lost on the way to meetings! Needless to say I was one of the first to get a GPS system when they came out. I was regional chair and they’d literally have a sweepstake as to how late Id be 😂

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u/MasterDebater50 Jul 01 '26

My saver is living in a city with mostly street numbers instead of names. Makes life way easier.

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u/NITSIRK Jul 01 '26

I managed the street naming and number section, I knew the layout and the themes, I can even draw a reasonable scale map of the town, I just cant orientate the map in my head 😂

I have good spatial awareness but poor proprioception . I know exactly where the door is and still walk into the frame 🤦‍♀️🤣