Pros And Cons Of Prosopagnosia

Facial Features and Racial Recognition

Prosopagnosia- an inability to recognize the faces of familiar people, typically as a result of damage to the brain.

Prosopagnosia effects two percent if the people in America. However much that this sounds somewhat interesting, for our science project Kailee and I decided to see if people more easily distinguish between the faces of people of their own race or ethnicity compared to those of people of other races or ethnicities? Kailee and I had a very interesting time with this question and doing the tests on different people. The results were also very exciting and disappointing to me.

The project that we did was somewhat based on the neurological disorder called Prosopagnosia. This disorder

The worst that could happen is that the faces of family members would not be distinguishable. There are pros to being able to tell faces a part, one of those are to be able to tell friend from foe. Most humans are able to tell the difference between faces but no human can do this small task better than... infants. Apparently at the age of just a few months infants begin to fine-tune their face recognition skills for the faces they see, that would be people of the same race or ethnicity. On a side note, I was curious about children who are mixed do they distinguish between both races easily or is it harder for them? Prosopagnosia was also mistaken by some as the “Cross-race Effect”. The cross-race effect is The cross-race effect;sometimes called cross-race bias, is the tendency to more easily recognize faces of the race that he or she is more familiar with. Prosopagnosia is nothing like the the cross-race effect, which is usually seen in courts of law while prosopagnosia is a neurologic disorder.

None of our test subject had Prosopagnosia, our tests were just see if it would be easier to tell the difference between faces. Now that the understanding of Prosopagnosia is there the supplies that you would need for you to do this project at home