Researching and Raising Awareness for Face Blindness
Sophia Symalla is using her love of research to help people recognize a condition she has had to face herself.
Sophia, who hails from Woodbury, Minn., is a junior at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. She’s double majoring in psychology and neuroscience and is studying prosopagnosia, a condition that makes it difficult to recognize and remember people’s faces. As part of the study, Sophia is developing a facial recognition program, a means for helping people recognize that they may have the condition.
The effort is personal for Sophia. She has prosopagnosia and struggles to recognize people by their facial features.
“It’s something most people have never heard of,” she said, “and so many people don’t realize they have it. I want my research to help change that, to let them know that there is a reason they can’t recognize people and to learn coping skills.”
Prosopagnosia, also known as “face blindness,” is most often the result of brain damage. Others, like Sophia, are born with the condition.
Growing up, Sophia realized she had difficulty recognizing and remembering people. She attributed it to having a bad memory or simply not paying attention. During her senior year in high school, as she became more interested in neuroscience, Sophia became aware of prosopagnosia. She realized that despite spending significant time with many of her classmates for years, she couldn’t recognize most of them.
“It can be very isolating. Oftentimes people think you don’t like them because you can’t recognize them,” Sophia said, noting the condition is correlated to anxiety and depression.
Sophia has learned coping skills to overcome prosopagnosia. She focuses on distinct facial features, such as a mustache, that make someone memorable. She also lets people know she has the condition, part of her effort to raise awareness about it.
“I ask people who they are and I tell them ‘Hey, I'm not good with faces. Please tell me who you are and how I know you,” Sophia said. “This isn’t something you can fix. It’s not something you can take meds for. It’s something you have to learn to live with.”
Sophia doesn’t let prosopagnosia get in the way of her academic success or her interactions with people. A standout student, she has an affinity for research and praises UWRF for providing students with high-quality research opportunities often only available to graduate students at larger universities. In addition to her prosopagnosia study, she is also currently conducting research on nicotine exposure, specifically examining how social isolation in adolescents impacts nicotine addiction.
She has presented research at numerous events and will do so next at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Pittsburgh in April.
In fact, Sophia has been involved with five research projects during her time at UWRF. She started research as a first-year student after professors urged her to do so.
“The professors here are focused on teaching us,” she said. “They are really great about helping us with our research, guiding us but having us do the work so we really learn about what we’re studying. Their approach helps so much with developing critical thinking and it enables you to learn how to do proper research.”
Her experiences at UWRF have prepared Sophia for her future aspiration of obtaining a doctoral degree in neuroscience, she said. They’ve also enabled her to conduct meaningful - potentially groundbreaking - research on prosopagnosia in a way that could help others realize they have the condition and learn helpful strategies to live with it successfully.
“Part of what I want this project to do is raise awareness,” Sophia said. “If we get this testing out there and have people learn that they have this condition, I think it could really help with people’s knowledge of themselves. It’s good to know that there is a reason they can’t recognize others, and I want to help them learn to live with this in a successful way.”