smallbrownfrog

wait so face blindness is also... race blindness?

I think that one must vary by person. I’m also face blind and I’ve never confused a dark skinned person for a light skinned one. My mind seems to take in a generalized impression of body type, hair, and color, followed by an impression of their personality and way of moving.

For example I worked with a quiet young man who was ultra pale and ultra skinny and tall, with very long, very straight hair. Then one day they hired someone new and the new guy was a quiet young man who was pale and ultra skinny and tall, with very long, very straight hair. I had absolutely no idea who was who. I had to wait until they were in the same room and somebody called one of them by name. Then I franticly looked for differences as fast as I could. I was able to tell them apart after that, but there were some people I could only “recognize” by looking at the work schedule to see who was supposed to be there with me!

I’m another person with lifelong prosopagnosia, and different people with it have different recognition strategies. I remember somebody who said they recognized hands and somebody else who used skull shape. I seem to use a combination of voice and how somebody acts (their personality and body language) to narrow down who it is beyond their rough body type and hair style.

There are definitely different levels. Facial recognition in general is a bell curve with “super recognizers” at one extreme and face blind people at the other.

edit: I could never quite comprehend what your experience is actually like, obviously, but I imagine it's a similar mechanism to when I see a person walking down the street quite a ways away, but still able to tell who it is by gait?

Seeing somebody at a distance and recognizing them is a great example, and yes, it’s exactly like that. The example that I often give is that if you go to a Halloween party where everyone is in costume you can often figure out who a lot of the people are by how they sound, move, and behave.

does it affect your ability to recognize emotional facial expression?

I got tested by some people who were studying face blindness and they gave me a separate test for my ability to see facial emotions. I scored very high at that, but scored in the bottom 1% for facial recognition. In fact facial expressions and emotions are a big part of how I recognize people. Different people wear their emotions differently.

Also there is a distinct facial expression that people make when they recognize someone. It’s a super brief expression and not on a conscious level. When I see that expression I know that they know me and that helps me narrow down who they are. (I was using this trick long before I was consciously aware that I was face blind or that there was an expression people make when they recognize someone.)

There are definitely people who have trouble with both facial recognition and recognizing emotions. I think some autistic people have trouble with both.

I actually was tested by some academic researchers in that group. (It was fascinating how their test defeated my coping strategies.) You have to fit whatever study they are currently doing though, so there’s no guarantee they’ll want to test you if you contact them.

Also, regular neurologists can test for the sort of face blindness you get from an injury later in life, but they are truly awful at testing for born-with-it face blindness. I have passed that sort of test even though I couldn’t tell the two people apart who were testing me. (I realized that one was wearing a necklace and then suddenly knew they were two people but I couldn’t have told you when the switch happened.)

woah. this is genuinely fascinating! it makes perfect sense, explained, but I can't personally imagine separating the two, they're so intrinsically bound to me.

There’s one place where you might have experienced a situation where the face is the same physical face but wears emotions with a different style and personality. Can you think of an actor who disappears into their roles and always seems to be a different person each time? Their physical face is the same, but they move it differently and move their body and voice differently in different roles. It’s not a common skill, and a lot of actors always play the same style of character, but when you see an actor become someone else, then you are seeing a bit of how I recognize people by how they uniquely inhabit their face.

thanks for taking the time to explain. I don't mean to minimize your whole life experience, but it's an endlessly fascinating thing to ponder.

It’s all good. I wouldn’t have joined in the conversation if I wasn’t up for pondering the fascinating aspects and geeking out over them.

far less obviously fundamental than say blindness or deafness, but a thing that is very hard to imagine not having, because it's such a basic part of socal interaction we all take for granted. (I'm an anosmic, so I occasionally have to explain that experience, which is can be hard to relate to another, explaining something you don't experience.)

I had to look up “anosmic.” I imagine you’d have to be much more careful about checking food expiration dates and things like that. Yeah, explaining a lack of an experience can be kind of funny.