face-blind

English

Adjective

face-blind (comparative more face-blind, superlative most face-blind)

1. Having face blindness (prosopagnosia); unable to recognize faces.
   • 2007, Richard Powers, The Echo Maker: A Novel, →ISBN, page 150:

     Few weeks went by when he didn&'t receive letters from anxious readers struggling with some attenuated form of failing to recognize old acquaintances. Some were consoled by Weber's bombshell: a simple neurological quirk that revealed how everyone suffered from a form of prosopagnosia. Even normal recognition fails when the observed face is upside down. Mark Schluter was not face-blind. Just the reverse: he saw differences that were not there.

   • 2007, Suzanne C. Lawton, Asperger Syndrome: Natural Steps Toward a Better Life, →ISBN, page 41:

     The face-blind person will remember the hair, the glasses, and maybe even the mannerisms, but not the facial features of the other person. It seems to affect about 60 percent of all adults with AS. Medical researcher, Ingo Kennerknecht, assuming that prosopagnosia was rare, tested a group of 689 middle-school children and some medical personnel. He discovered that 2.4 percent of this group had some measure of face blindness.

   • 2014, Guy Brook-Hart, Simon Haines, Complete Advanced Student's Book with Answers with CD-ROM, →ISBN, page 206:

     Researchers have used face-blind volunteers to explore this question. The subjects were shown images of cars, tools, guns, houses and landscapes, and also black-and-white pictures of faces with no hair on their heads. Ten of these images were repeated. The subjects were asked to indicate, as quickly as possible, whether each image they saw was new or repeated. The results were surprising. None of the face-blind subjects could recognise the faces in the series well, but they could distinguish between the other repeated pictures as easily as people without prosopagnosia could. That confirms the idea that faces are handled differently by the brain from other objects.

   • 2015, Ellyn Kaschak, Sight Unseen: Gender and Race Through Blind Eyes, →ISBN, page 5:

     Because humans develop familiarity with faces and facial expressions at specific times in our lives, those who are deprived of human contact or changing facial expressions at that age often have trouble reading expressions for their entire lives. Formerly blind people are often face-blind or unable to decipher emotion from facial expression. Some have trouble differentiating between male and female faces (Inglis-Arkell 2013).