July 2023: Joanna Lumley reveals she has prosopagnosia
June 2023: Katie writing on the use of voter ID
In this article for the Conversation, Katie considers whether voters be required to show photo ID. https://theconversation.com/voter-id-most-people-are-terrible-at-matching-faces-to-photos-making-polling-checks-unreliable-205168
May 2023: New paper!
In this study we show that development prosopagnosics sometimes struggle to individuate animal faces: Epihova, G., Cook, R., & Andrews, T. J. (2023). Recognition of animal faces is impaired in developmental prosopagnosia. Cognition, 237, 105477.
December 2022: Where do first impressions come from?
Writing in Psyche magazine, Rich considers why we sometimes form spontaneous judgements about the traits and characteristics of others based on their facial appearance.
https://psyche.co/ideas/why-do-we-make-snap-judgments-based-on-facial-appearance
June 2022: New paper!
In this study we find that individuals with developmental prosopagnosia show signs of subtle expression recognition deficits, particularly when forced to base decisions on the eye-region alone: Tsantani, M., Gray, K. L., & Cook, R. (2022). New evidence of impaired expression recognition in developmental prosopagnosia. Cortex, 154, 15-26.
November 2021: New paper!
In this work led by Maria Tsantani, we assess whether the PI20 questionnaire provides meaningful evidence of face recognition impairment: Tsantani, M., Vestner, T., & Cook, R. (2021). The Twenty Item Prosopagnosia Index (PI20) provides meaningful evidence of face recognition impairment. Royal Society open science, 8(11), 202062.
April 2021: Neuroimaging study at the University of York
Would you like to know what your brain looks like? Researchers at the University of York (UK) are seeking individuals with developmental prosopagnosia for a neuroimaging study. Participants will be required to make simple decisions about visual stimuli while their neural activity is measured using functional MRI. For more information please contact Gabriela Epihova (gir504@york.ac.uk).
January 2021: Problems recognising non-face objects
Happy new year everyone! In 2021, the troublewithfaces team will be investigating the problems recognising non-face objects (e.g., cars, bikes, keys) sometimes seen in developmental prosopagnosia. We would love to hear about any anecdotes you'd be willing to share. What types of objects / situations do you have problems with? Please email troublewithfaces@gmail.com with your experiences (with the subject line 'objects')
November 2020: New paper is out!
Several regions of the brain implicated in face processing also appear to be involved in the recognition of identity from voice cues. In this paper we investigate whether people with developmental prosopagnosia (DPs) experience problems with vocal recognition as well as face recognition. We find that DPs show typical unimpaired recognition of celebrity voice.
This paper is freely available here: Normal recognition of famous voices in developmental prosopagnosia | Scientific Reports (nature.com)
October 2018: Federica completes her PhD!
Huge congratulation to Dr Federica Biotti on the successful defense of her PhD thesis.
September 2017: New member of the team!
We are delighted to announce that Maria Tsantani has joined troublewithfaces.org.
October 2017: A new paper is out!
A collaboration between Troublewithfaces and Faceblind teams resulted in a new publication in Cortex, where co-first authors Federica Biotti and Esther Wu showed normal composite face effect in two independent groups of individuals with developmental prosopagnosia. We want to thank Professor Brad Duchaine and his team for the brilliant work!
September 2017: Richard moves to Birkbeck, University of London
After 5 years lecturing at City, University of London, Richard moves to Birkbeck College, where he will be holding the position of Reader in Psychology.
May 2017: A new paper is out!
In her latest study published in Cortex, Federica showed that developmental prosopagnosia can be associated with difficulties recognising bodies. The lack of association between body and general object recognition impairments suggests that these two deficits may occur as independent neurodevelopmental conditions.
July 2016: New testing Centre at the University of Reading
We are delighted to announce that Dr Katie Gray (a lecturer at the University of Reading) has joined the troublewithfaces.org team as a Principal Investigator.
May 2016: New paper
This study, published in the journal Cortex, investigates the perception of facial emotion by individuals with developmental prosopagnosia. A big thank you to all those who took part!
April 2016: Quick guide to developmental prosopagnosia
In this article published in Current Biology, Rich and Fede discuss the causes and symptoms of developmental prosopagnosia.
November 2015: Article in The Conversation
In this article appearing in The Conversation, Rich and Fede discuss developmental prosopagnosia.
June 2015: The PI20 is published!
Our new self-report scale for the identification of prosopagnosic traits, the PI20, has been published at Royal Society Open Science. A big thank you to everyone who assisted in its construction and validation.
October 2014: New paper to be published in Cortex!
The following paper on memory for faces in developmental prosopagnosia will soon appear in Cortex. We would like to thank all those who participated.
Shah, P., Gaule, A., Gaigg, S., Bird, G., & Cook, R. (2014). Probing short-term face memory in developmental prosopagnosia. Cortex.
August 2014: Is facial symmetry related to health?
In his article in The Conversation Rich discusses new research that casts doubt on the received story that facial symmetry is a attractive because it signals immuno-competence or 'good genes'.
July 2014: Rich wins the Wiley Prize!
Rich has been awarded the British Academy's 2014 Wiley Prize in Psychology in recognition of his outstanding early-career work.
March 2014: New insights into acquired prosopagnosia
There has been a longstanding debate about whether faces are processed by brain mechanisms specialised for faces or not. Research from Brad Duchine's lab has now found that, individuals with prosopagnosia, after training, are able to learn to discriminate between Greebles (novel objects that differ from one another in similar ways to faces) but remain impaired at recognising faces. This suggests that faces are processed in a specialized way compared to other objects, and that prosopagnosia is likely to be a face-specific difficulty. Rezlescu, C., Barton, J. S., Pitcher, D., & Duchaine, B. (2014). Normal acquisition of expertise with greebles in two cases of acquired prosopagnosia. PNAS.
November 2013: Prosopagnosia in the news
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/nov/22/exp-erience-prosopagnosia-face-blindness-neurology