In a recent MinnPost article, Al Yonas, professor in the Institute of Child Development, describes his research on developing screening tests for children with “face blindness,” a neurological disorder that makes kids unable to remember faces. Developmental prosopagnosia, the scientific name for the disorder, occurs in up to 2 percent of the population according to some estimates.
Yonas’s lab and that of Harvard University psychologist Ken Nakayama recently received grants from the National Eye Institute to create screening tests for children with the disorder — tests that may make it possible to diagnosis prosopagnosia at a very early age, when treatments might be most effective. Yonas is hoping to identify about 30 children who suffer from the disorder to work with them.
“The goal is to find these children and get them down here to establish that they’re really suffering from the problem — and then engage them in a training program,” Yonas says in the article.