Lexee Hoene
EDITORIAL INTERN
A recent York University study shows that individuals who cannot recognize faces can make up for it by an enhanced sense of voice recognition.
Prosopagnosia, otherwise known as face blindness, is a rare disorder where one loses the ability to visually recognize faces.
The study, published in Neuropsychologia, suggested that human brains distinguish between people and objects in two disassociated parts of the brain.
Jennifer Steeves, an associate professor of psychology at York, lead the study; she’s one of many researchers working at the Sherman Health Science Research Centre, which opened at the Keele campus Sept. 14.
Researchers completed a series of experiments that looked into the recognition level of faces, voices, sounds and objects, and compared individuals diagnosed with prosopagnosia against those without.
Before conducting this experiment, subjects were shown 110 images of female faces that had no visible differences or characteristics. The individuals were also provided with an auditory clip where a 20-second passage was spoken in English.
Following this exercise, the subjects were questioned on the visual and auditory-only models, both separately and in conjunction.
Although people diagnosed with prosopagnosia relied upon the auditory clip to recognize faces, this did not apply to recognizing objects. The study suggested that the human brain uses two separate neurological areas when identifying people and objects.
With files from YFile
