How Common Is Developmental Prosopagnosia? What the 3% Estimate Means

Several earlier studies estimated the prevalence of developmental prosopagnosia, and a figure of roughly 2% has often been cited. That's not a small proportion, but because prosopagnosia itself isn't widely known, it has tended to carry an impression of being a "rare condition."

Estimates like this can shift depending on the number of participants, the region studied, and the method used to measure difficulty with face recognition. As research accumulates, prevalence estimates naturally get revisited.

Published in Cortex in 2023, the study by DeGutis and colleagues assessed 3,116 US adults aged 18–55 online. With self-report and two face-recognition tasks, z-score criteria including mild DP yielded 3.08% (major 0.93% + mild 2.15%). About 1 in 33 is a rounded description of this sample under those criteria.

In the same sample, commonly used stricter criteria yielded 0.93%. Earlier estimates of about 2% used different samples and methods. The difference alone does not demonstrate an increase in prevalence or an update to a more accurate rate.

Face-recognition ability varies between people. In this sample, DeGutis and colleagues did not find a clear natural boundary identifying people with DP. That finding does not settle whether DP forms a distinct category; the paper also calls for further research.

About 3% is an estimate of the proportion meeting particular research criteria. Changing the criteria changes the estimate. Major and mild refer to classifications based on test thresholds, not direct measures of how much difficulty someone experiences in daily life.

A voluntary online sample has limits to its representativeness. This percentage cannot directly tell us how many people in a school or workplace in Japan have DP. The study population and assessment method need to accompany the number.

An individual’s everyday difficulties cannot be judged from a study percentage alone. Rather than using the number to assess yourself or someone close to you, reflecting on the specific situations that are difficult can help you understand the experience.