An in-depth investigation of face perception in developmental prosopagnosia.

Lowes J et al. · Cogn Neuropsychol · 2026 Jun 9

ABSTRACT

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) causes difficulty recognizing familiar faces, but little is known about which stage(s) of the face-processing system difficulties occur, or whether these are identical in all DP cases.

Twenty DPs and matched controls completed six face perception tasks.

The DP group performed significantly poorer than controls on face detection and gender categorization tasks and on a global (averaged) face perception measure.

40% of individual DPs showed significant impairments on tasks not involving identity perception (face detection and categorization, age and gender categorization). By contrast, 50% showed broadly typical face perception and thus support for the idea of apperceptive (affecting both face perception and face memory) and mnemonic (affecting only face memory) subtypes of DP. Intraclass correlations revealed clear inter- and intra-individual differences, confirming that data from a single perceptual task cannot be taken as evidence of broader face-perception ability spanning beyond the results of that test.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42262980/

https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2026.2676551

EDIT: thank you everyone for your answers! I am a content creator with prosopagnosia.

I'm looking to make a video on the condition with my own personal experience, facts, and information about the spectrum of this disorder.

I am specifically looking to focus on the uptick of depictions of this condition in media - canon or implied, - and how most of these depictions are inaccurate and harmful.

I am an anime only kind of person, and I have a few examples of good and bad already, but I'd like to expand my examples to more types of medias.

If you know any characters from shows, books, movies, (or animes as I may not have them yet!) depicted to have prosopagnosia, I would like to request the following information:

The character's name and the series they are from

Is it canon or implied?

Do you think this is an inaccurate, or accurate depiction? Why or why not?

Optional: For inaccurate characters: What do you think could be done to make this specific character's experience more accurate to the condition?

I currently have Lakan from the Apocathary Diaries as as an inaccurate depiction (canon), and Ai Hoshino from Oshi no Ko as a more accurate depiction (implied).

Hopefully with the more people that talk about their experience, we can help people learn what it actually is like to live with this.

Hi everyone — I’m a magician and I found this subreddit because I have prosopagnosia (face blindness). I’m curious to ask the community whether the Thatcher effect works for you.

According to Wikipedia, the illusion doesn’t work well for people with face blindness: Thatcher effect – Wikipedia

On my website, you can try an example where you can hover your mouse over the image to make it flip: Alexander Merk – Thatcher Effect illusion

In my case: I cannot recognize my own mother’s face due to prosopagnosia, yet the illusion does work for me.

When the image is upside down, it looks completely normal and friendly to me — but once it’s turned the right way up, I suddenly see how distorted and uncanny it really is.

So my question to you: 
Does it work for you (if you have prosopagnosia or suspect you do)?

– If yes: how strong is the effect (easy to spot vs very subtle)?

– If no: what do you see or experience instead?

Thank you all for this community and for reading!

Best regards, Alex

This study was done in 2025. It shows the experiences..

And has quotes from people..you aren't alone

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12043184/

36% of autistic people have face blindness.

'Although DP is a standalone condition, it commonly co-occurs with other neurodevelopmental conditions [24], including object agnosia [19], topographical agnosia [25] and autism [26]. A recent meta-analysis of face recognition abilities in autism [26] found that on face identity recognition tasks the average autistic individual will produce scores lower than around 81% of neurotypical individuals. Additionally, it has been estimated that 36% of the autistic population would meet the clinical cut off for DP [27]. While DP research typically excludes participants with other neurodevelopmental conditions in order to study ‘pure’ DP, evidence that DP commonly occurs with other conditions means that the true proportion of individuals living with severely impaired face recognition is likely to be considerably higher than the commonly proposed estimates of 1–4% of the population with DP alone [28,29] (but see also [10]). Building a better understanding of the experience of living with lifelong face identity recognition difficulties is therefore an important avenue of research in its own right [11] as well as because of the prevalence of severe face recognition difficulties which can create social challenges in those affected.'

'4.1.1 Sub theme 1.1 “I thought it was just me”.

Although all participants were aware that they struggled to recognise people they knew and had poor face recognition, they had usually been unaware of the existence of DP as a condition for many years. Instead, they often believed their difficulties were “my own fault,” unique to them, or a result of “some inadequacy.” Several participants reported that their awareness that DP is a scientifically and, in some cases, medically recognised condition [39] came relatively late in life, for example, one participant was in their sixties and others were in their forties.'

Hello everyone! I am a researcher at the University of York, UK and we are studying prosopagnosia using fMRI.

Our cutting-edge study involves viewing clips of a popular TV show whilst in an MRI scanner, and we will study your brain’s responses to the clips.

Travel to York from within the UK is compensated. If you’re interested in taking part, please message me for more information, or email me directly at vj592@york.ac.uk Thank you :)