ARS390

Ieok Cheng Chang

Reflection to Dr. Behrmann’s presentation – prosopagnosia

9/28/2020

 

I have always had questions about prosopagnosia. Once I saw a research study about prosopagnosia on the internet, and it showed that 1 out of 50 people has varying degrees of face blindness. After that I would sometimes doubt myself if I am one of the patients that suffer from prosopagnosia, especially in a period of time when I was living in the States. I was very glad that Dr. Behrmann answered a lot of questions I had in my mind that helped me to recognise prosopagnosia and to realize that I probably did not have a problem in terms of prosopagnosia in my brain, I was just having mild, normal symptoms like everybody did. 

 

Growing up in an Asia country and being raised in a Asia family, in the first 17 years of my life I had hardly seen any forgien people. However, during the past three years, I have seen more forgien people than I have had in my entire life because I moved and started attending college here in the States. Just like Dr. Behrmann said, most of the Asia people look alike to the American people. In my first year in the States, the class of 20 people looked alike to me, and I had a very hard time remembering people’s names. Even when I watched British or American movies, it took time for me to differentiate between those characters and sometimes they were not clear until the ending part of the movie. When Dr. Behrmann brought up the fact that the growing environment, growing locations, language and races of a person would affect the performance of prosopagnosia. It explained the reason I couldn’t distinguish forgien people’s faces was because I grew up in a different community and ethnicity from the US. As I recalled the second, the third year in the states. I found out that I was getting better and better in recognizing faces and I could start remembering more and more names of my classmates in a class. It explains getting more adept to a culture or community helps one’s to get better not just in the field of language, but also facial recognition.