Face Blindness and Physical Attraction.

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I used to not like Leonardo Dicaprio because of all the fuss made apon him.
... But then, one day, I saw a film where he was playing and... waow! A great actor!

I've seen a few other films with him and now, I like him quite a lot - but it's true that it's more about his talent and his personality than about his good looking.

I scored 81% on that test. Although the website tells me this is the score for the average person, I had the feeling I was simply guessing most of the time. I would also have expected a lower score based on my difficulties with faces in everyday life.

I find that many women look like Barbie dolls to me: uninteresting, exchangeable and unattractive. Others, on the other hand, look like they were members of a different species: their facial expressions convey genuine emotions; they seem to be the only real humans in a population of animated robots. The curious thing is that which category a woman falls into depends to a large part on her haircut. This goes so far that for some pictures of women, if I cover parts of the hair with my fingers, the face immediately becomes emotionally expressive; it's like Pinocchio turning from a wooden doll into a real human.

I did some more experiments with manipulating haircuts on pictures and came up with a theory on my blog (Link) which basically says that I can see faces in an NT-like empathic way (facial expressions triggering emotion mirror neurons or something similar) if other features like hair, clothing, and body form/body language do not block the input from the face processing channel.

Whatever the explanation for this effect might be, I cannot imagine falling in love with a girl that looked like one of the Barbie dolls on TV to me.

96%!

I am more than a little prosopagnosic. If I don't see you regularly, I will be unable to recognise you except in an expected context - even if you are my immediate family. After a couple of months away, I have trouble recognising my own children.

As for attractiveness, some people stand out and are attractive, others stand out and are unattractive. The others - the overwhelming majority - just blend in. Attractiveness among these people depends more on my mood than their actual appearances, which are indistinguishable to me.

Incidentally, I consistently score in the mid-40s on the Cambridge face recognition test. I do OK on the first part, and just plain awful on the second part.

This test has become part of a set of tests topic on this forum:
Set of scientific tests related to Autism Spectrum Disorders

I scored 83% correct on the test, but in ordinary life I have great difficulties with recognizing faces. In ordinary life I am not permitted to stare fixedly at a person's face for twenty seconds, memorizing the features. The test is actually asking me to memorize faces in the way I've got to do it, which is socially unacceptable in person.

I suspect that I find people attractive based on their motor mannerisms. I've a work acquaintance I have a strong liking for. He's got some distinctive motor mannerisms. A couple of months ago I completely failed to recognize him, because he was sitting still, but I've known him (and had this absurd 'I like you very much for no real reason' feeling for him) for over a year.

Yes, I relate to this~
I have realized that what attracts me most are certain hairstyles. XD;

Ooh, a test.
76%
That was harder than I thought. XD; Especially since it was CG, so not even a mole or a scar to cheat with.
The only ones I really feel like I remembered well enough to not just guess were mousy guy, blobby guy, and weird-long-face guy. But I guess that was half the faces, so not bad.

Of course, most times IRL it's not 1 in 6 faces you're trying to identify, it's 1 in ALL THE FACES IN THE WORLD. D:

I certainly agree with this. I often notice that people who I'm attracted to are somewhat unusual-looking; that it's really quite difficult to mistake them for anyone else. It often puzzles me when I hear others enthusing about how good-looking Person A is when, to me, they look exactly the same as dozens of other people; I don't find anything memorable or remarkable about their features.

I usually have to meet someone half a dozen times before I begin to recognize them on sight, and even then, if I see them 'out of context', somewhere I wasn't expecting them, I can be thrown again and be unsure whether it's really them or not. Changes of hair and clothes also confuse me.

I often have people seem rather offended because I haven't recognized them after meeting them once several weeks/months ago.

I have read before that women are supposed to be best at recognizing the faces of other women, but I find them even more difficult.

I am pretty face blind and never really find anyone attractive at all. To me, people are just people and that's about it... I can't find anyone attractive at all unless I talk to them a lot first and get to know them.

As far as celebrities, they are just putting on a show for people when they are shown so that can't be taken as anything genuine to tie to their personalities, therefore there is no reason to be interested in this one or that one for me... I can, however, recognize a few right off if I see them-but that is because I used to work in this middle of nowhere place that people (bands) would have to stop at to get gas in the middle of the night.

I found that rather interesting, as the ones people would really freak out over were usually the really rude and obnoxious ones (Nelly, for instance), lol... and the ones people expected to be "out there" (Korn), were actually very nice. As far as movie people go, the only person I can recognize (and pin a name to the face of) is Brad Pitt... and that's because he was a jerk to us in a gas station in Springfield, MO.

I am sort of face blind myself. I can recognize the people I see often, but not the ones I haven't seen in a long time. To make things worse, I am in Panama, where most people are dark haired, dark skinned and dark-eyed, so most of them don't really stand out for me to recognize them easily.

I cannot drive, I'd freak out if I found myself behind the wheel of a car. The other day, there was this guy in a motorcycle, and he called me a "fag". Spanish of course. This is the second time it happens, and it may be because I crossed the street while he was trying to sneak in between two cars (that was a year ago). Thing is, recognizing him by his face is a no-no, and the helmet makes it harder. I have been unable to get the license plate so far, but he might work somewhere in this area.

It sounds foolish, but it s a fine example that someone with face blindness may be unable to deal with someone messing with him unless he acts right away, and that's not the case most of the time. Fortunately, I have never found myself unable to recognize someone I like, unless I haven't seen him in a really long time, like ten years.

I could have written the original post.
Incidentally, I scored average, I think, on the face recognition test when I took it, but I don't believe it accurately simulates how a person memorizes a face. I don't sit and study a person's perfectly still face for a period of time like in the test. I scored average, but in reality, I never remember faces. It may not be prosopagnosia; it may just be that when I talk to someone, I'm concentrating on what they're saying and not on their face. I can only take in so much at once.

I've been thinking about this for a while too! Having been teased by people for years for my preferrence for odd looking people, it ocurred to me that my problems with facial recognition might be to blame. The only people I remember are those that stand out either because they're hideous (in my opinion) or because they're one of the four people I actually find attractive (And all of them are odd in some way). I love films yet often find myself watching one and finding it hard to tell certain characters apart! Plastic people look the same!