Re: faceblind: Prosopagnosia Research

faceblind: Prosopagnosia Research

Here is another testing opportunity for Prosopagnosia on west coast of the USA.
Posted in LiveJournal July 23rd, 2009

Prosopagnosia Research
I recently went to visit Dr. Nathan Witthoft, an individual working in the Stanford Vision and Perception Neuroscience Lab, who is doing research on individuals that have prosopagnosia. I had a very good time speaking with him and taking part in his tests. It was really neat to actually have someone test my facial perception and show me how I fared compared with people that are more neurotypical. I'm really curious to see what he comes up with in his research.

Anyways, he's looking for more volunteers to come in and take some of his tests, so I thought I'd pass along the information, as he is a nice guy doing legit research in this field.

Here's a description of what he's doing that he sent me:
" I work in a visual neuroscience lab that studies high level vision using psychophysics and fMRI. We have an ongoing project studying people with congenital prosopagnosia. Generally speaking people with CP have normal vision and normal cognition but extraordinary difficulty recognizing people from their faces. This difficulty is lifelong, though it does take some people a while to realize that there face recognition is not as good as most other people. The experiments are a number of psychophysical tasks which we use to try to understand the nature of the problem and also several brain imaging experiments including fMRI and DTI (mapping the white matter pathways in the brain). We do pay for subjects' time, though the amount is limited by the IRB, generally 15$/hour for the behavioral studies and 30$/hour for the imaging. Let me know if the description sounds like you and you are interested in participating. If you are not sure if you fall into this group or not, we have our own set of tests that are fairly good at
picking out people with real difficulties."

The lab's website is here: http://vpnl.stanford.edu/

If you have any interest in working with him, his email address is witthoft@stanford.edu. I think he's looking for locals, since he wants people to come into his office to do the tests, but if you know anyone that might be interested, let them know.