Prosopagnosia and Its Relation with Face Specific Systems - Term Paper Example

Since the exact reasons for prosopagnosia are still unknown, no therapies guarantee complete recovery from prosopagnosia. According to Oliver Sacks (a psychologist and a victim of prosopagnosia), “people with prosopagnosia need to be resourceful, inventive in finding strategies for circumventing their deficits: recognizing people by an unusual nose or beard, or by their spectacles, or a certain type of clothing” (Sacks, 2010). Face recognition is an important function of the brain and the importance of face recognition in human life cannot be underestimated.

Consider a person who is living in this world without the ability to recognize his friends and relatives. A life with Prosopagnosia is horrible when we look into the consequences of this disease. Some people consider prosopagnosia as a normal disease whereas some others consider it as a psychological disorder. “Some investigators argue that it is caused by the impairment of a recognition system specialized for faces. Others argue in contrast that it is caused by an impairment of system of systems essential for face recognition, but not specialized for it” (Duchaine, 2000, p.79). It is a fact that in some cases people loss their face recognition ability after an accident which caused damages to the brain.

On the other hand, there are many other cases in which people develop prosopagnosia gradually without a particular reason. That is why psychologists and medical experts are still searching the reasons for prosopagnosia in darkness. Recent researches have formulated many hypothesises and pointed out many reasons as the probable causes of Prosopagnosia. The existence of a face specific system is suggested by some of the researchers in this field. In their opinion, Prosopagnosia is caused by the problems occurred to the face recognition system rather than anything else.

This paper analyses the above argument deeply with the help of some of the published studies. Prosopagnosia & face specific system “Much of the work on face perception has focused on front views of faces, but a face is a complex 3-D object that must be recognised from all directions” (Marotta et al, 2002, p.32). However, human ability to recognize faces from different angels is limited. It is easy for human to recognize a face when it is in a zero degree angle as shown in the figure below.

Sample face from Max-Planck Face Database rotated in depth around the vertical axis. From left to right: full face (0°), right three-quarter (45°), and right profile (90°). (Marotta et al, 2002, p.37) In other words, full face will be visible to human eyes only when it is in zero degree angle. In all the other angles as shown in the figure above, some parts of the face will not be visible to a viewer. The ability of a normal human to recognize a face is more when it is viewed at zero angles than at any other angles.

The above points will be helpful in further analysis of Prosopagnosia. The question; whether the human visual system consists of a standardized system for recognising objects or specific systems for identifying each objects, is a controversial and confusing one for psychologists and medical experts. This is because of the fact that people with Prosopagnosia disease show not many changes in recognising other objects even though they struggle to recognise faces. Farah et al (1995)