Face Recognition

[rebbyribs]

Last night, we hosted Bab5 on a very last-minute basis. It was just me and Ben until the doorbell rang at 8:30 or so. I opened the door and saw someone who didn't look the least bit familiar to me. I said hi, and was about to ask if he was here for Bab5, when he said "Hi" (and maybe something else, and I immediately recognized him from his voice

Comments

[anemone]

A person on my friend list has this problem--it even has a name, prosopagnosia.

There's a neat page that uses stones to show why face recognition is inherently difficult, but I google is giving me links to broken pages. I think it was off of http://www.prosopagnosia.com/ -- maybe it will come back up.

(I am I think worse that average, but probably only slightly so.)

[nibot]

60%

[rebbyribs]

Yeah, I think I got 62% or so. Were you surprised?

[nibot]

All look same!

I don't think I'm particularly bad at recognizing people, so I am a bit surprised that other people get > 90%!

[anemone]

I got 71%. I'm not very surprised, because I often have trouble in movies when both the bad guy and the good guy are men with dark hair.

[trinity_gal]

There's another person on my flist with prosopagnosia whose life can get interesting - there was a similar-ish test whether you'd recognise a celebrity face - especially if you haven't completely avoided mainstream media :) See if I can dig it out...

I got 90% in your test which is much less than I thought actually - I can get freaked out by seeing familiar faces in London streets just because they were in LJ userpics not so frequenting some LJ communities I'm in...However my memory for trivia is absolutely awful, that's why I never did sciences (ended up doing maths even though I secretly wanted doing biology).

[rebbyribs]

I've done the celebrity one as well, although I'm not really up on pop culture. I do know that I can hardly ever recognize actors from one movie to another, although it seems like it should be hard to recognize actors playing different characters because they'd have different makeup and clothing and mannerisms.

[belochka]

i didn't have a chance to try it when i first saw your link on my phone, but now that i'm coming back to post on another entry i ran across the post again

i got 89% (64 out of 72 faces)

i don't know how that relates to other people in frequency, but i expected to have above-average, though not stellar face recognition

one of my funniest face recognition stories:

one time, back in late high school, i was in Boston on the metro and saw a girl i recognized. this was before high school, so before i _expected_ to see lots of somewhat familiar faces. i went through all the possibilities i could to figure out where i could know her from and was thinking of coming up and asking

and then i realized that she was one of the models in a figure-drawing class i was attending

so on one hand she looked familiar because i had spent 3 hours drawing her a few weeks earlier, but on the other hand the context was a little different because she wasn't wearing any clothes that time

i was glad i caught myself before asking :)

[plymouth]

96%! 69 of 72! Woo! I think all the ones I got wrong were during the first 6-face test. Towards the end of that I started to forget them. If the second 6-face test had different faces I think I would have started getting those wrong too but given that I got to reinforce my memory of the same 6 faces before that test I think I actually did better even with the pixelization. (of course I can't be sure since they don't tell you which ones you got wrong).

I may be good with faces but I am ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE with names so I get a lot of "I know I know you from somewhere, I totally forgot your name".

[eeyore_grrl]

57%. I'm not particularly surprised. People will seem familiar, but I won't be able to place it and sometimes I'm just wrong. I also can't describe people well, for whatever that means in comparison/conjunction with that.

I'm even worse with remembering names. Which is a problem teaching, particularly in public school regular education classes where you teach over 100 kids a day. Subbing was a frikkin' nightmare for me.