• General Definition

Apperceptive Agnosia

Associative Agnosia

Prosopagnosia

Mirror Agnosia

Treatment

References  

PROSOPAGNOSIA

• Prosopagnosia is type of associative agnosia specific for face recognition that can be so severe patients cannot even recognize their own faces. 

• Often results from right occipito-temporal lesions, and can be developmental, acquired, sex-specific or gender neutral.

• Thought to be based on holistic representations (instead of processing via decomposition and reconstruction).

• Affected people can often use other non-visual cues, such as hairline, voice, and clothing to identify people, and can even recognize facial patterns, although profiles can be confusing. 

• Occurs in the absence of any other disorder of visual processing, suggesting that there are areas of the brain that specifically process visual information pertaining to face recognition.

• The complexity of face recognition strongly suggests that there are multiple regions of the brain involved in face processing, that if damaged lead to prosopagnosia, but the exact underlying cause has yet to be identified.