Heard of face blindness? Researchers just used ‘Game of Thrones’ to better understand the disorder

Terms like colour blindness and selective blindness are fairly common, but have you ever heard of face blindness? Also known as prosopagnosia, this disorder prevents individuals from identifying or recognising faces. Imagine not being able to distinguish between faces!

Most people with prosopagnosia are born with it, and it affects approximately 1 in 50 people. To make matters worse, this condition often persists throughout their lives. Naturally, those who struggle with facial recognition experience challenges in forming relationships, leading to mental health issues and social anxiety.

To delve deeper into this disorder, researchers conducted a study—published recently in Cerebral Cortex—where they scanned the brains of over 70 participants while they watched scenes from the popular TV series ‘Game of Thrones’.

The choice of ‘Game of Thrones’ had nothing to do with Arya Stark’s encounters with the Faceless Men and the Many-Faced God. Instead, the show was chosen for its international appeal and strong characters with nuanced personalities. The aim was to create a realistic scenario, as previous studies on facial recognition mechanisms in the brain have often used static 2D images in laboratory settings.
There’s more to facial recognition than meets the eye
The study involved participants who were neurotypical as well as those who suffered from prosopagnosia. Among both groups, half of the participants were familiar with the show's complex characters, while the other half had never seen the series.

When lead characters appeared on screen, MRI scans revealed that neurotypical participants familiar with the characters showed increased brain activity in regions associated with non-visual knowledge about the characters, such as their identities and background information. However, these connections were significantly weaker in neurotypical participants who had never watched the series.
To further explore the importance of these brain regions for face recognition, the researchers repeated the study with participants who had prosopagnosia. In line with their difficulty recognising faces, participants with prosopagnosia did not exhibit the same familiarity effects in the brain regions observed in neurotypical participants. The connections between visual and non-visual regions were also reduced.

Excited with these results, study’s senior author Professor Tim Andrews explained: “They suggest that our ability to recognise faces relies on what we know about people, not just what they look like.

“While it was believed that we recognise faces by learning their visual properties—such as features, configuration, and texture—our study indicates that it involves connecting a face with knowledge about the person, including their character traits, body language, our personal experiences with them, and our feelings towards them.”
Overall, this research enhances the understanding of how prosopagnosia is linked to reduced neural connections, making it challenging to associate faces with personal knowledge, which is crucial for recognition. The findings also shed light on how the neural mechanisms behind face recognition, or the lack thereof in prosopagnosia, can offer insights into the condition and inform potential therapeutic strategies.

The researchers plan to conduct further studies to explore in more detail how activity across different brain regions enables us to recognise faces, and what factors can disrupt this process.