Prosopagnosia is a disorder of face perception

Face perception

Face perception is the process by which the brain and mind understand and interpret the face, particularly the human face.The human face's proportions and expressions are important to identify origin, emotional tendencies, health qualities, and some social information. From birth, faces are...

 where the ability to recognize face

Face

The face is a central sense organ complex, for those animals that have one, normally on the ventral surface of the head, and can, depending on the definition in the human case, include the hair, forehead, eyebrow, eyelashes, eyes, nose, ears, cheeks, mouth, lips, philtrum, temple, teeth, skin, and...

s is impaired, while the ability to recognize other objects may be relatively intact. The term originally referred to a condition following acute brain damage

Brain damage

"Brain damage" or "brain injury" is the destruction or degeneration of brain cells. Brain injuries occur due to a wide range of internal and external factors...

, but a congenital

Congenital disorder

A congenital disorder, or congenital disease, is a condition existing at birth and often before birth, or that develops during the first month of life , regardless of causation...

 form of the disorder has been proposed, which may be inherited by about 2.5% of the population. The specific brain area usually associated with prosopagnosia is the fusiform gyrus

Fusiform gyrus

The fusiform gyrus is part of the temporal lobe in Brodmann Area 37. It is also known as the occipitotemporal gyrus. Other sources have the fusiform gyrus above the occipitotemporal gyrus and underneath the parahippocampal gyrus....

.

Few successful therapies have so far been developed for affected people, although individuals often learn to use 'piecemeal' or 'feature by feature' recognition strategies.