Walsh & Hoyt: Clinical Aspects of Prosopagnosia

Patients with prosopagnosia cannot recognize most faces as familiar; rather, to identify people they rely mainly on voices or nonfacial visual cues, such as gait or mannerisms. On occasion they may use distinct face-related cues such as an unusual pair of glasses, a hairstyle, or a scar, cues that bypass the need to recognize the actual face. At other times the context of an encounter can prompt their recognition: they may recognize a physician in the hospital but not on the street. This may have a parallel in the laboratory phenomenon of ""provoked overt recognition."" Here, when shown faces of people from a related category (e.g., sharing the same occupation), some patients with prosopagnosia can name the faces once they grasp the nature of the relationship. Another variation in recognition ability occurs in patients with the unusual anterograde form of prosopagnosia. Patients with this condition cannot learn to recognize new faces after the onset of their lesion, but their recognition of faces encountered before their lesion occurred is intact.