Never remember a face? You must have been a tiny baby, says study
MOST of us will have endured the occasional, toe-curling embarrassment of bumping into someone we have met before and failing to recognise them.
But if you are one of those who regularly has trouble remembering faces, there may be an explanation – it could be linked to how much you weighed as a baby.
A new study has found that children who were considered underweight when they were born are poorer at recognising faces when they are older.
Researchers believe having a low weight at birth is linked to impairments in the way parts of the brain develop, including those areas that deal with visual information.
In extreme cases, it can lead to a disorder known as face blindness, or prosopagnosia, where sufferers struggle to recognise friends, family and even their own face.
About 2.5% of the population is thought to be affected to some degree.
Hollywood actor Brad Pitt, comedian Stephen Fry and British politician Patricia Hewitt are among those who have admitted suffering from face blindness.
Dr Victoria Pueyo, a paediatric ophthalmologist who led the new Spanish study, said that in most cases the effects are quite subtle but can still lead to difficulties in social situations.
She said: ‘Children with problems in face recognition will have difficulties with many activities, such as identifying their friends in the playground.
‘They might struggle to find their parents in a crowded place or interpret facial expressions.
‘Although many of these difficulties would go unnoticed by the children, these deficits represent an increased effort and difficulty dealing with daily life.’ The researchers tested 77 children between the ages of five and 15 years old for their ability to recognise faces.
Half of the children had been born underweight, weighing on average just 3.7lb, while the rest were considered normal weight – around 6.3lb.
They were shown photographs of three people’s faces. They were then immediately asked to pick out the same people from a selection of six new pictures.
They were also asked to carry out a similar task but with two minutes between seeing the first set of faces and then looking at the six new photographs, in order to test their memory.
In both cases, children who had been born underweight were able to recognise only two-thirds of the faces that their normal-weight peers could.