Researchers have been working to learn more about face blindness (prosopagnosia), a brain disorder affecting an estimated 2 percent of the population that makes it difficult for people to distinguish one face from another.
For a new study, psychologists used the HBO series
Game of Thrones to gain new insights into the brain processes involved in recognizing faces.
Researchers employed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of people watching the popular show and concluded that the ability to recognize faces isn’t solely based on what a person looks like, but also what we know about them.
“Our research improves our understanding of how prosopagnosia appears to be linked to reduced neural connections, making it challenging to associate faces with personal knowledge, which is crucial for recognition,” says senior author Tim Andrews, PhD, professor in the department of psychology at the University of York in England.
Participants Watched ‘Game of Thrones’ While Having a Brain Scan
Researchers recruited 73 subjects: 28 with face blindness and 45 without the condition (the control or neurotypical group).
Participants were selected to represent each of the following groups:
- Control participants who regularly watched Game of Thrones
- Control participants not familiar with the show
- People with prosopagnosia familiar with Game of Thrones
- People with prosopagnosia who had never watched the show
Scientists scanned the brains of all subjects as they watched footage from the medieval drama. (Why Game of Thrones? According to researchers, they choose the series because of its strong characters with nuanced personalities.)
When the lead characters appeared on screen, MRI scans showed that in neurotypical participants who were familiar with the characters, brain activity increased in regions of the brain associated with nonvisual knowledge about the characters, such as who they are and what we know about them.
Connections between the visual brain and these nonvisual regions were also increased in neurotypical people who were familiar with Game of Thrones. However, these waves of activity were significantly reduced in the group of neurotypical people who’d never watched the series.
The researchers repeated the experiment in subjects with face blindness.
“We found that activity in these nonvisual regions was significantly reduced as was the connectivity between the visual and nonvisual regions. This again provides more evidence for these nonvisual regions being important for recognition,” says Dr. Andrews.
How Does Our Brain Recognize a Familiar Face?
Previous research in face recognition has primarily focused on how we remember people based on what their faces look like, based on the belief that we recognize faces by learning their visual properties such as features, configuration, and texture, Andrews says.
“However, in real life we also learn about people, not just how they look. This nonvisual, conceptual information includes who a person is, what they do, what they are like. Our study indicates that it involves connecting a face with knowledge about the person, including their character traits, body language, our personal experiences with them, and our feelings towards them,” says Andrews.
The findings also suggest that people with face blindness have difficulty reading social situations because they are unable to use nonvisual information about people, he says.
Researchers plan future studies to explore in more detail how activity across different regions of the brain allows us to recognize faces as well as what factors can disrupt this process.
Face Blindness Can Be Challenging to Live With
Face blindness can be a very difficult and isolating disorder, says Christopher Filley, MD, professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Anschutz, Colorado, who was not involved in the study.
“People with face blindness can be considered rude or awkward or even autistic or mentally ill because they aren’t able to recognize people that they know,” he says.
The condition can vary in severity, ranging from having trouble recognizing acquaintances to being unable to recognize partners or even their own faces, says Dr. Filley.
People can be born with prosopagnosia (congenital prosopagnosia) due to issues in the initial wiring of the brain’s facial perception network or it can be acquired as the result of damage caused by a brain tumor, stroke, head trauma or Alzheimer’s disease.
There is no cure for facial blindness. Currently, people experiencing problems should talk to a healthcare provider to find behavioral and physical therapies to help cope and compensate for the condition.
Depending on the cause of facial blindness, a person may use other nonfacial features to recognize that person, such as walk, voice, mannerisms, hair styles, and facial hair.
Could the Research Findings Be Used to Help People With Prosopagnosia?
It’s not clear how insights from the study could immediately be used to help people with face blindness, says Andrews.
But since most previous attempts to improve face recognition in prosopagnosia have focused on the visual properties of the face, these new findings could potentially become the basis for different kinds of interventions, he says.
