Prosopagnosia

When someone who you have met many times still doesn’t recognize who you are, is it a bad memory or could it be something else?

Prosopagnosia

This refers to difficulty recognizing people that they have encountered many times. In extreme cases, prosopagnosics have trouble recognizing even those people that they spend the most time with such as their spouses and their children. They rely on non-facial information such as hair, gait, clothing, voice, and other information. Someone with this may also have trouble following the plot of television shows and movies, because they cannot keep track of the identity of the characters.

It is thought that the cases of prosopagnosia that have been documented have been due to brain damage suffered after maturity from head trauma, stroke, and degenerative diseases. They were easily documented because at one time they had no problem with facial recognition.

Developmental prosopagnosia has been used to refer to people whose prosopagnosia is genetic, individuals who experienced brain damage prior to experience with faces, and individuals who experienced brain damage or severe visual problems during childhood.

Because of the difference in paths to Prosopagnosia the type of impairment could be different.

In an article on Discovery health’s website, the fusiform gyrus is referenced as the possible problem in the brain for not being able to recognize faces. “When you're looking at a face, the fusiform gyrus, located in the temporal lobe, is stimulated. Researchers infer then that the problem has something to do with the fusiform gyrus itself or in the neural pathways that convey information from that area to other parts of the brain, like the occipital lobe, which processes visual information.”

http://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/neurological-conditions/face-blind.htm