What condition made it difficult for Jane Goodall to recognize familiar faces?

What condition made it difficult for Jane Goodall to recognize familiar faces? The condition was prosopagnosia.

Prosopagnosia, commonly called face blindness, is a cognitive condition involving difficulty recognizing familiar faces. A person may know that a face is familiar yet struggle to identify the individual, even when vision, intelligence and recognition of objects are otherwise relatively unaffected. Goodall has discussed experiencing this difficulty with human faces and with chimpanzee faces.

The condition helps explain why Goodall relied heavily on detailed behavioral observation and distinctive traits when identifying chimpanzees. Researchers at Gombe gave individual animals names and tracked their appearances, relationships, vocalizations, movements and social histories over many years. That broader evidence was especially valuable when facial recognition was unreliable.

Prosopagnosia is often confused with ordinary forgetfulness or poor eyesight. It is specifically a problem with recognizing identities from faces, and it can be developmental or acquired after neurological injury. Dyslexia affects reading, aphantasia concerns voluntary mental imagery, and synesthesia involves unusual cross-sensory experiences; none is the condition described here.