Let’s split hairs: Examination of face learning strategies in developmental prosopagnosia.

Developmental prosopagnosics (DPs) have debilitating deficits in face recognition. Trying to memorize and recognize the face of someone they have met can be challenging and often too difficult. Most DPs have stated when interviewed, that they recognize individuals through extraneous information such as clothing, voice, or hair. While many studies have anecdotally provided evidence that DPs might use this external information; no research has systematically investigated how appearance might affect DP recognition. In this study, DPs (N = 30) studied videos of three identities chosen for their consistency in hairstyle and makeup. DPs were then shown a series of test images that either: a) were similar in appearance to learning, or b) were dissimilar in hairstyle to learning. Half of these images were cropped so that only inner features (eyes, nose, mouth, etc.) were shown and half were headshots including external features (hair, ears, jawline) but excluded any background or clothing information. Compared to controls, DPs were worse when appearance was dissimilar to learning but were equally as accurate when appearance was similar to learning. Indicating that DPs do in fact use appearance as a cue to identity recognition and under certain circumstances can correctly identify faces they have viewed.