At which age does face blindness set in for individuals?

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Hi, been reading about face blindness here and understood better why I have difficulty recognising most people I do not see regularly.

I was fine before university. Up to junior college (the high school equivalent in Singapore), my classes were more or less fixed, such that I attended all lessons with the pretty much the same group of people in each school. Also, we were uniforms. Therefore I could focus on memorising and recognising one group of faces without having to consider different clothes, hairstyles and makeup. My primary school only had 100+ students per level, and I knew everyone in my year by name and sight.

When I entered university, I ran into a lot of primary/secondary school & junior college classmates (elementary/middle/high school in the US system). With 100+ primary and secondary schools respectively, 17 junior colleges, 5 polytechnics and 3 public universities, people who continue their studies in Singapore tend to meet each other again. Many of my former classmates are girls too, and now they are wearing makeup and street clothes. So I have to look past the makeup and clothes to match the face to the person I remembered from several years back, and maybe take a longer time to respond to what they say to me.

Just wondering if anyone else here been in this kind of situation too?

Birth?

I beg your pardon?

ASDs are developmental disorders, they are not know for showing degenerative loss of functions such as in Alzhiemer's disease.

Skills in ASDs are not lost, rather they are never present to begin with.

Thus, any deficits that the individual would be afflicted with would be present at an age that others would normally develop those skills.

Since facial recognition is one of the earliest developed skills, face blindness would have been apparent from childhood.

Thanks for your informative reply Molecular_Biologist.

So maybe it's just me getting confused...

Maybe you're mildly faceblind and can only recognize about a hundred people. Any more than that and you get overloaded.

Also, people change appearance tremendously throughout puberty. If you miss seeing a person in that age range for several years, they'll look totally different. Your jaw gets bigger, parts of your face grow out before other parts (my Mom had a huge nose for a few years before the rest of her face caught up) and you loose your chubby kid cheeks. If you have mild faceblindness you may be more tripped up by these changes than most people.

In most cases, Prosopagnosia is congenital, although there have been cases in which onset of the disorder became apparent after a brain injury.

I try to memorize one or two notable characteristics about a person in order to recognize them in the future. Could be their hair, the way they walk, their voice, etc.

I would have to say it starts at birth. My mother comes from an extremely large family. They had to remind who was who constantly when I was a kid when they would come over for a visit. I'd only see these people every two years or so. I was constantly forgetting their faces and had to get use to them being around me everytime I met them.

Thanks everyone for your replies!

I've always been faceblind.

Yup, it's congenital. Starts at birth.

However, it can be acquired through a stroke or brain injury of some kind. These are the most dramatic cases and for a long time we thought they were the only ones out there. That's probably because people with developmental prosopagnosia (the from-birth kind) learn to cope pretty well and often don't even know they are particularly bad at recognizing people. Also, most of the time people who are born with it will have a form of face-blindness not quite as severe as what they would get from an acute brain injury: They'll be able to recognize the faces of close friends and family, their own faces, tell whether a face is similar or different from another, or at the very least recognize that something is a face rather than another object. People who acquire face-blindness through an injury are often unable to recognize even their own faces; and since their whole lives before that point they had normal face-recognition abilities, the difference is very dramatic. Whereas, if you have it from birth, you may learn to identify your parents by voice and movement style and hair and clothing and maybe even smell... by the time you're in school, you're just convinced you're inattentive or bad at remembering names; and until you read about what face-blindness is, you don't realize just how hard you work to remember what everybody looks like.