Face Blindness in Children and Current Interventions

Abstract

Children with prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, struggle to recognize the faces of acquaintances, which can have a negative impact on their social interactions and overall functioning. This paper reviews existing research on interventions for children with prosopagnosia, including compensatory and remedial strategies, and provides a summary and comparison of their effectiveness. However, despite the availability of these interventions, their effectiveness remains limited and constrained by various factors. The lack of a widely accepted treatment for children with prosopagnosia emphasizes the need for further research to improve intervention strategies. Last, three future research directions were proposed to improve interventions for prosopagnosia, including ecological approaches, the social challenges faced by children, and new potential intervention methods.

Facing the Best in Handling Prosopagnosia

“…Depending on the timely occurrence of the impairment, two main forms of face blindness are distinguished, acquired prosopagnosia (AP) and developmental prosopagnosia (DP). DP, also known as congenital prosopagnosia, usually develops without any accompanying intellectual deficits, emotional disturbances, problems with object recognition, or acquired brain damage, whereas AP results from observable neurological damage such as ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke, traumatic brain injury, certain neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric illnesses, such as Alzheimer disease, depression, and schizophrenia (Ma et al, 2023) and therefore often goes along with additional impairments. In addition to a purely temporal attribution, several types of prosopagnosia can be distinguished, including apperceptive variants, i.e.…”