Medical Press reported that COVID-19 can cause ‘face blindness‘ and navigational problems according to a new Dartmouth study in Cortex. The researchers worked with Annie, a 28-year-old customer service representative and part-time portrait artist, who was diagnosed with COVID-19 in March 2020 and suffered a symptom relapse two months later. Shortly after the relapse, Annie noticed difficulty with face recognition and navigation.
Annie began having trouble recognizing her family. When her father called out to her, she thought his voice was coming out of a stranger’s face. She now relies on voices to recognize friends and loved ones. She began having difficulty navigating the grocery story and could not find her parked car.
She was presented photos of 60 celebrities and could identify just 29% of them. Most people can identify 84% of the celebrity faces. Granted Tom Hanks could resemble Mr. Rogers or the serial rapist who lives down the street and who needs to be able to identify Tilde Swinton anyway? She isn’t actually a celebrity.
She was given the Cambridge Face Memory test in which she was shown photos of 6 men. She was then asked to discriminated between those men and photos of other strangers. Annie could identify the faces 56% of the time while most people get 80% correct.
Her test scores in face detection, face identity perception, and object recognition were normal, indicating respectively, that Annie’s problems with faces are due to face memory deficits and are not a more generalized impairment.
Annie had flawless test scores in scene processing. When she was shown a set of landscapes and was then shown them again with a new set, she made no errors in identifying the landscapes she had been previously shown.
Annie also did really well in voice recognition tests in comparison to the controls, so the researchers think that her problems with face processing are mostly likely due to a deficit within the visual system.
There may be a lot of other people who have quite severe and selective deficits following COVID. To test this theory researchers polled 54 individuals who had long COVID with symptoms for 12 weeks or more; and 32 persons who had reported that they had fully recovered from COVID-19. A broad majority of people in the long COVID group reported noticeable difficulties doing things that they were able to do before contracting COVID-19. One of the challenges that many respondents reported was a difficulty with visualizing family and friends.