Experts in psychology have long known that prosopagnosia — a condition also known as face blindness — is caused by brain damage, but it was unknown until recently that roughly 2 percent of the population is born with the facial recognition disorder, according to Dartmouth College psychological and brain sciences professor Brad Duchaine, who devotes his time to studying the condition.
People with prosopagnosia often cannot recognize the faces of close friends or even family members and have to rely on other clues, such as voice or gait. Prosopagnosics usually have other types of recognition impairment, such as place or object recognition, but sometimes it is just an issue of face perception, Duchaine said.
“There are a lot of people out there that have face-processing deficiencies,” Duchaine said.
Through his research, Duchaine said he hopes to better understand the science behind the condition in order to develop ways to help those who suffer from it. In conjunction with Ken Nakayama, a psychology professor at Harvard U., Duchaine said he devotes his time to studying the cognitive and neural basis of prosopagnosia.
Duchaine said he is interested in discovering the process in the brain that leads to face perception and hopes to find the genes involved in developmental or genetically-based prosopagnosia. He is also working on developing better tests for identifying children with prosopagnosia, improving treatment and raising awareness about the condition. Nakayama and Duchaine created Faceblind.org in January 2002, a website that serves as a forum for people with prosopagnosia. Through the website, about 6,500 prosopagnosics can converse with prominent experts about their condition, according to Duchaine.
Duchaine’s research can be used to develop methods to help prosopagnosics improve their facial recognition abilities.
“[Duchaine’s research] is important for understanding social interactions, but it is also important for computer science and artificial intelligence,” Ming Meng, a Dartmouth psychological and brain sciences professor, said.
If scientists can understand how facial perception works in the human brain, perhaps one day they can develop technologies that can recognize faces as well, a development that would be important for the future of the technological world, according to Meng.
Duchaine joined the Dartmouth faculty in June 2010 and has been well-received by the community, he said. Duchaine offers a “unique perspective” on the field, and his presence has broadened the ability of the psychological and brain sciences department to address the complicated relationship between brain processing and social perception, Meng said.
“Of all the professors I’ve had at Darmouth, Duchaine has been one of my favorites,” Jesse Gomez, who works with Duchaine in the psychological and brain sciences department’s social perception lab, said. “It’s been great working with him. He’s a genius, but he’s so down to earth.”
Gomez said that Duchaine is not only studying the problem but also developing tests to better identify the disease and spread awareness.
“Prosopagnosia can be debilitating, and Duchaine offers a personal viewpoint to the study of [the disease],” Gomez said.
Duchaine previously worked at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, where he and his colleagues brought together the largest sample of prosopagnosics in the world. Duchaine recieved his PhD in psychology at U. California, Santa Barbara and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Vision Sciences Lab at Harvard.