Face Blindness/Prosopagnosia

[Progster]

I think I have a mild version of it - I find it hard to recognise and remember faces, especially when the person is out of context, for example, seeing someone at work on the street, chances are that I won't recognise them, or when the person changes their hair style or clothes even. I tend to recognise people by their hair style and colour, tall or short, the clothes that they wear or the car they drive.

 

[Isadoorian]

Yeah, I sometimes have this issue myself... a bit minor but eventually I'll get the hang of whose who

 

[Adora]

I have some difficulty with recognising faces I had this issue occur again while at comic con two weeks ago where I was trying to find my husband and even though he wasn’t far away it was hard for me to recognise his face and even when there isn’t many around me or just me or that person it can take me a few moments to register who that person is even if I have known them for awhile but I think it’s due to the fact that I don’t make eye contact a lot.

 

[Gritches]

I have it. It's a difficult reality to...face.

 

[Autistamatic]

I've had difficulty with this all my life, particularly in the manner described by @Progster
It takes me a while to learn people's faces even IN context, but when out of context I'm hopeless. More than once I've walked past someone in a supermarket who I was talking to at work only half an hour before.
I've realised over the years that I recognise people primarily by features other than their face - their voices in particular. Many is the time we'll be watching an American show and I'll spot someone like Jeffrey Coombes, Andrew Robinson, Ethan Phillips, Armin Shimerman or the like who I've only usually seen in heavy prosthetic makeup as a regular alien on a variation of Star Trek, purely because I know their voice so well. Sometimes before I've even seen them on screen.

 

[Ezra]

I have it. It was more severe when I was younger. I identified people more by sound of voice and smell. I still have some difficulty recognizing people and telling people apart.

 

[Pats]

I could never find my kids in a crowd. It just dawned on me - I do look at the eyes, well, one eye and it drives me crazy when I start bouncing around and can't decide which eye to look at. lol But the eye is all I see when talking to someone. What just dawned on me is that I could never tell you what color their eyes are either, so what the heck am I looking at? lol
Oh, I did realize recently that I think photos help. I can see the face in a photo easier and I have so many photos of my kids that I could describe them easily. Photos of my mom and dad and sisters and brother. And I think when I start thinking about someone close to me, it's the photo picture that comes to mind.

 

[BraidedPony]

I just took the test and scored high. If they had shown the hair it would have been much easier.

 

[OkRad]

Got it bad but did not show up till after an accident. People I met the day before would say HI OKRAD and I would not know who they are.

I think it's getting better. But when it happens, I just tell people Oh dear! I am so sorry! Sometimes I can't recognize faces.....

It's no biggie because everyone is dealing with something. Most people understand.

 

[BraidedPony]

There was another test on that link about reading people’s eyes. I took that one too and scored very low. I had to guess on each photo of eyes, I just couldn’t tell what emotion was being expressed.
This may be an Aspie thing, not being able to read other people’s emotions.

 

[Ray Nite]

This is my first time reading about it. I heard of it from mom once. I'm sorry you go through this. Are you familiar with aura reading? I wonder if it could bypass your disability.

 

[Peter Morrison]

I used to think that my inability to recognize people properly was a sign that I never give due attention to acknowledging the people I meet. I'm one of those ASD who doesn't like looking people in the eye when I talk to them. The last thought in my head is studying their face so that I can recognize them in a line-up.

 

[Iamnotarabot]

I dont like the test because I dont see how they are any relevant, you can take your time to guess on a limited amount of answers, that's not how it works IRL my first guess is like never one of the availaible answers but most of the time I can find with it.

The test give me a result like 25 and its like above 60% the participant BUT im sorry half my answers were just not what I was thinking at first.

I dont realy know if i am good at that or not, id say im average bad.

As a kid I felt weird after a vacation camp because I had a hard time recognizing my parents and it felt weird, I remember I scanned them in my head in order to not forget lol.

Im never sure that I recognize some people when I dont know them very well.
Get tricked when they change their style aswell.

Another weird stuff , I dont know why but I recognize people I know in strangers face everyday, I think it is because I dont realy realy register the detail of people faces but this is realy disturbing.

 

[tree]

How Children Learn to Recognize Faces

"There are two different kinds of visual information that people use to recognize faces,...Young children begin by relying on feature information, like the size of the eyes, the size and shape of the nose, the presence and color of a beard. But as children mature, they learn to use what he called “configural information,” which reflects that underlying structure.

Configural information would include the distance between the features, and their relations to the contour of the face."

 

[Iamnotarabot]

"There are two different kinds of visual information that people use to recognize faces,...Young children begin by relying on feature information, like the size of the eyes, the size and shape of the nose, the presence and color of a beard. But as children mature, they learn to use what he called “configural information,” which reflects that underlying structure.

Configural information would include the distance between the features, and their relations to the contour of the face."

I guess I rely heavily on the feature informations hehe , but i'm not completely face blind I think, just maybe impaired?

 

[Crossbreed]

But as children mature, they learn to use what he called “configural information,” which reflects that underlying structure.

Configural information would include the distance between the features, and their relations to the contour of the face."

Since autism is a pervasive development disorder, is prosopagnosia a failure to mature in that area?

I find that I am able to recognize stills, celebrities and head sculpts of my figures (also still). My face-blindness seems to occur more often with real people, in real-time (particularly those that I don't see very often).

 

[OkRad]

I do think pdd may be behind this. I have both. But prosopagnosia worsened after an accident. But Dr said it was there before and not I just really notice it.

 

[stringer]

Another weird stuff , I dont know why but I recognize people I know in strangers face everyday, I think it is because I dont realy realy register the detail of people faces but this is realy disturbing.

I do this a lot. And sometimes I find that someone I meet looks like some famous person whose appearance I am familiar with. It can be really helpful to me for fixing the person in my mind, and I very likely will have no trouble recognising them again. (Of course, if I ever ran into the famous celebrity I might then confuse them with the person I know!)

An interesting thing I find about my finding that X looks like Y is that sometimes other people will agree with me about it, but more often than not, they don't. I suspect this is because the principal features I look at in a face are different from those that most people focus on. Not surprisingly, I don't look at eyes. I think I focus almost exclusively on people's mouths. So I suppose the cases where other people agree with my "X looks like Y" are when the mouth is the dominant feature in the face. And when other people don't agree with my "X looks like Y," it could be because the eyes of X and Y are very different, but I am seeing only a similarity of the mouths.

An added complication for me is that I have aphantasia, so I don't have any mental imagery of anyone or anything. I still "know what people look like" if I know them well, but not because I can see an image of them in my mind.

 

[Alexej]

Another treasure from the past.

I was searching for face blindness in here and this is one of the threads that came up.

I was prompted to look at this since I spoke to somebody whom I met 25 years ago and she recognised me but I had no idea who she was, but was able to work backwards from what she said to what the context was.