Is It Just Face Blindness? Exploring Developmental Comorbidity in Individuals with Self-Reported Developmental Prosopagnosia

Nanna Svart,Randi Starrfelt

doi:10.3390/brainsci12020230

Abstract

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP)—or ‘face blindness’—refers to life-long problems with facial recognition in the absence of brain injury. We know that neurodevelopmental disorders tend to co-occur, and this study aims to explore if individuals with self-reported DP also report indications of other neurodevelopmental disorders, deficits, or conditions (developmental comorbidity). In total, 115 individuals with self-reported DP participated in this online cross-sectional survey. Face recognition impairment was measured with a validated self-report instrument. Indications of difficulties with navigation, math, reading, or spelling were measured with a tailored questionnaire using items from published sources. Additional diagnoses were measured with direct questions. We also included open-ended questions about cognitive strengths and difficulties. Results: Overall, 57% reported at minimum one developmental comorbidity of interest, with most reflecting specific cognitive impairment (e.g., in memory or object recognition) rather than diagnostic categories (e.g., ADHD, dyslexia). Interestingly, many participants reported cognitive skills or strengths within the same domains that others reported impairment, indicating a diverse pattern of cognitive strengths and difficulties in this sample. The frequency and diversity of self-reported developmental comorbidity suggests that face recognition could be important to consider in future investigations of neurodevelopmental comorbidity patterns.

Highlights

Without the ability to recognize faces, one would live in a world of strangers
developmental prosopagnosia (DP) research has primarily been concerned with mechanistic or cognitive interpretations of the disorder, and in particular the question of whether individuals with DP have abnormalities in other domains [15,16,17,18]. It has been debated whether object agnosia and reading difficulties could be associated with DP, and this has been linked to discussions about the functional organization of high-level vision, e.g., [19,20,21,22,23,24], see [25] and accompanying commentaries for review
For the severity groups based on the PI20 [71], 15 participants scored within the mild DP group, 42 participants scored within the moderate DP group, and 58 scored within the severe DP group

Summary

Introduction

Without the ability to recognize faces, one would live in a world of strangers This is the reality of people suffering from developmental prosopagnosia (DP), a neurodevelopmental disorder of face recognition. While acquired prosopagnosia following brain injury to the occipito-temporal or anterior temporal regions [5,6] has been studied for many decades, DP did not receive notable research interest until this millennium [7,8] This is intriguing, as estimates suggest that 2–2.5% of the population suffer from DP [9,10], but see [11] for a discussion. The broader question of whether face recognition deficits might be overlapping with other neurodevelopmental disorders or conditions has received less attention, and here we aim to take the initial steps to explore this question

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