title: Prosopagnosia in biographies and autobiographies.
abstract: Prosopagnosia is a selective impairment of the visual learning and recognition of faces. The congenital type, which is not accompanied by detectable brain damage or malformation, was recently found to be far more common than previously known. Therefore, one should expect that at least a few biographies or autobiographies would reveal a prosopagnosia. In this paper we present an autobiography and a biography describing five cases of congenital prosopagnosia. These biographic descriptions of prosopagnosia add further evidence to the assumption that the congenital type of prosopagnosia is not a rare condition, and not as socially crippling as one might expect.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological Basic Research, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria. thomas.grueter@univie.ac.at
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Grüter
authors.forename: Martina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Grüter
mesh_terms: D001325:Autobiographies as Topic; D001680:Biographies as Topic; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008569:Memory Disorders / Q000523:psychology; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D020238:Prosopagnosia / Q000523:psychology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology