What Makes Prosopagnosia Difficult
The core of prosopagnosia is a marked difficulty identifying individual faces that can't be explained by vision problems or general intelligence. Developmental prosopagnosia is present from childhood, but "developmental" here doesn't mean it belongs to the same diagnostic category as ASD or ADHD — it simply describes that the difficulty with face recognition arose during brain development rather than after an injury.
How It Differs From — and Overlaps With — ASD
ASD is diagnosed primarily around social communication and patterns of behavior and interests. Some people with ASD do have difficulty with attention to faces, eye contact, reading expressions, or face memory, but facial recognition ability varies widely among individuals with ASD.
Research suggests the face-processing differences seen in ASD and the specific difficulty with individual face identification in developmental prosopagnosia are, at minimum, not driven by exactly the same mechanism. Developmental prosopagnosia occurs in people without ASD as well.
How It Differs From — and Overlaps With — ADHD
ADHD is centered on inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity as core everyday features. Difficulty remembering people can arise from inattention — not looking closely enough at someone's face, being distracted when told their name, or trouble holding information in working memory.
Prosopagnosia is different: even when someone is looking directly at a face, reliably identifying its features as belonging to one specific individual is itself difficult. The two can co-occur, but there isn't sufficient evidence to conclude that ADHD causes prosopagnosia, or that most people with prosopagnosia also have ADHD.
Separating Out What Kind of Difficulty You Have
It helps to distinguish: not knowing whether you've seen someone before even while looking at their face, versus recognizing someone as familiar but blanking on their name, versus simply not having directed attention to the face or name in the first place. Some people can recognize a face but struggle to read expressions or intent; others can identify someone reliably given a cue like location or voice. Which stage the difficulty occurs at changes what kind of support actually helps.
Don't Settle on a Single Label
References & Sources
The authors and organizations listed below are cited as sources for this content. This does not imply their review or endorsement of this article.
- 01Konishi (2016) — Face recognition in developmental disorders
A review covering face recognition in congenital prosopagnosia and ASD.
- 02Dalrymple et al. (2014) — “A room full of strangers every day”
An overview of developmental prosopagnosia in children and how it is distinguished from other developmental conditions.
- 03Hedley et al. (2014) — Autism traits and developmental prosopagnosia
Examines the relationship between autistic traits and developmental prosopagnosia.
- 04Svart et al. (2022) — Comorbidity in developmental prosopagnosia
A survey of self-reported co-occurring conditions in developmental prosopagnosia, including discussion of research limitations.
This article is for general information only and is not a substitute for individual diagnosis or treatment. For the full list of references across the site, see the References page.