Police Technology Used as Aid for People with Prosopagnosia

Published: Jun 20, 2007

Psychologists at Carnegie Mellon University are working on high-tech aids to help people who, because of their genes, can’t recognize faces.

Most of us are instinctively able to scan thousands of faces to recognize ones we know. People with prosopagnosia are face-blind by birth – a condition that may affect one person in 50 and can be mistaken for autism. Marleen Behrmann is one of the psychologists at Carnegie Mellon University that wants to train patients through the use of face-recognition software
 
The UK police use the software for scanning video footage against thousands of known criminals. The team reports in “Trends In Cognitive Sciences” how MRI scans show, oddly, that when people with the condition see faces, the same regions of their brains light up as in normal people. Unraveling this mystery still presents a “large challenge,” says Behrmann in the Times Online.
 
“We are also designing programs that could train patients to improve their recognition skills,” Behrmann adds. Many prosopagnosics cope by looking for distinctive hairlines, beards or eyebrows.
 
Source: Times Online

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