Home » Health & Wellness » Asperger's/Autism » Face Blindness in Asperger's Syndrome

Face Blindness in Asperger's Syndrome

© Barbara Fowler

Face blindness, or prosopagnosia, occurs in some children and adults with Asperger's Syndrome or Autism. If your child exhibits any of the following behaviours, you should be aware of this condition:

1. Your child often follows someone out of the store (usually someone who looks like you) and will appear upset when you call him/her back.

2. Your child has great difficulty locating a friend in the school playground, even after you point the friend out.

3. Your child cannot seem to remember the names of all the children in his/her class, or mixes up children's names with the same hairstyle.

4. When your child is describing a situation at school and you ask him/her which teachers it was, the child responds "Well, I think it was Mrs. So and So, I am not sure."

5. Your child walks right past you without a glimmer of recognition on his/her face.

6. Your child gets upset when you cut or colour your hair.

My son has been exhibiting these behaviours now for a long time and it wasn't until I starting searching for Asperger's Syndrome information and came across a site at http://www.choisser.com/faceblind/ about faceblindness that I realized my son has the same condition. This is not the same as forgetting a name to go with a face, but rather a visual processing problem of recognizing a face.

In simple terms, people with prosopagnosia see a face, just like they see a tree, car, book, etc. Where they get stuck is recognizing that they know the face they are looking at. I find that when my son is distracted by noise, crowds, or someone speaking to him, his ability to recognize faces is very limited. He tends to use features like hair, glasses, mustache, hearing the person talk, watching them walk, or how they are dressed to help him identify people's faces.

Prosopagnosia has many different causes and research is still ongoing. A recent study at Yale University identified the area of the brain that people with Autism and Asperger's Syndrome use to recognize faces as the same area that they use to recognize objects (at the back of the brain) whereas neurotypical people use the front of the brain for face recognition. Other causes can be head injury, brain tumours and strokes. There appears to be no treatment for this condition but given the recent breakthrough at Yale University, I am hoping that treatment plans will be forthcoming.

The copyright of the article Face Blindness in Asperger's Syndrome in Asperger's/Autism is owned by . Permission to republish Face Blindness in Asperger's Syndrome in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.