Are you bad with facial recognition??

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I'm better at recognizes faces than what most of you describe, but I do have confusing moments. I am famous for the false positives, thinking a stranger is somebody I know. Or not recognizing actors from one movie to the next. If a person changes something about his or her appearance, such as hair or glasses, I will have problems.

My biggest fail was my father. He was working second shift, and I didn't get to see him during the week. One Friday night, I spent the night with a friend, and my dad answered the door when I came home in the morning. He had grown a beard, and I didn't recognize him at all. I backed up to look at the house to make sure I was home. Then I accused him of being a stranger in my parents house. Oooh that was embarrassing.

I'm curious if anyone else, like me, can recognize faces in photos or video without much trouble, and only has problems recognizing people in "real life"...?

Or when you get the opportunity to really study a person's face carefully, do you realize it looks different than your previous impression of it?

Yes. When I meet someone and they walk away and someone asked me what the person looked like I would not be able to answer them very well. I would have noticed how tall they were and maybe there skin tone and hair style. But I would not remember there face. When I look at someone I don't make allot of eye contact and when I do I make eye contact for too long. Sometimes I can remember someones face the next time I see them but it is only because they might have a mole or a unusually shaped nose or eyes. I don't really look closely at someone.

My situation is that certain people I can always recognise and others I cannot, and also if the location is different, then that also can depend upon if I recognise that person or not, for example if I see one of my karaoke singer at my job I may recognise them but if seeing them some other place I may not. This can be embarasing and I may seem like rude or not caring also. Why is it that some faces stick with me regardless of when or where and other faces do not?

Yeah, I have great difficulty with this, TOO!! If I see someone away from where I know them, I almost never recognize them, and they ALSO think I'm being rude, etc.. I can remember having a counselor, once, that even when I saw him outside of his office I didn't recognize him----I was like: "I don't remember him looking like that!!" LOL

I was too drunk to be bothered to read all of your post but judging from the topic heading/subject, yes I am. I've had relatives standing right in front of me in places I haven't expected to see them in and not recognised them.

Is that an Aspie thing? I thought I was just momentarily dumb! (on several occasions).

Also, I see people in groups of what they look like. There are about 9 different kinds of people. I see it. My ex-partner began to understand what I meant but she just couldn't quite get her head around it. But she knew I knew humans long before they knew themselves. Humans belong in boxes. Not shoe boxes like people tend to slot them in but lifestyle boxes. That's how society is set up and when you get people who want to fight against it, they can't escape what they really are.

To know thyself is true freedom. To be comfortable with one's own company is magic. To be at ease with oneself is bliss!! ! Solitude is Golden!! ! One should cherish it with all one's heart and defend it defiantly!! !

Don't be ashamed of preferring your own company. Don't feel the need to apologize. If you want to be alone, it must be because of a reason and that reason is reason enough to need to afford explanations as to why you don't wish to spend any more time with humans and why you'd rather go live on your own out in the wilderness.

I forget what the original question was. I was rambling but I don't care. It's all recorded on the Internet and I guess I'm using your question to state some things I've been thinking about lately and want to get down in words on the Internet and your question just happened to pique my interests and I started to write. I may have gone off topic but as I said, I don't care and I just had to get said what I said.





I am terrible at facial recognition but I can see similarities in groups of people who belong to the same group (for example, drug addicts. They get a certain look in the eyes/face). I also have trouble (when the ordinary person wouldn't have) determining if a person is male or female.

YES!

I'm horrible with remembering faces and names.
It has caused MANY uncomfortable and anxious moments at work....

This is the same way I figured it out too. My search was "have trouble following movies", because my family hates to watch a movie with me since I think the characters all look alike in some of them, and couldn't "pick up" the non-verbal cues. So then I thought I just had non-verbal learning disability, until I came across the list of traits of Aspies, and then was like "oh my gosh!!". It felt like someone followed me around my whole life and wrote the symptoms from that!

Very much so. I've forgotten how friends looked before. After meeting them a few times though, I do always remember.

WOW! That's my story. I think lots of us have the same/similar story. When I got diagnosed, I didn't even know what Asperger's was apart from the fact that it was a form of Autism and I got quite offended... until I read the description and I swear, it was as if they'd written it about me. Crazy shtuff!! !

I'm also really bad with names. I think I'm just not into people enough to put enough effort in to remembering their names. That's not entirely right. At work, there are people with whom I've worked with for years and know their names very well but I just have this thing where I'm afraid to say their name in case I get it wrong, so I wind up avoiding using their names and then I start to worry if it is becoming obvious that I don't use their names and they get offended. It's horrible living inside my head sometimes

I have a feeling "I have seen this face before" and I can recognize people by their hairstyle, nose, eyes, ears, mouth, face shape etc (aka - details, not face overall) but I am still pretty bad at recognizing people.

Especially my two cousins started to cause me problems recently. One is 16, the other 18 years old. I could recognize them easily before their puberty but right now they look like twins to me. Mostly because they have the same hairstyle.
If they stand next to each other I can guess which is which after thinking a bit (the younger one seems to have a little more round face and bigger eyes). But if I see only one of them... impossible.
It was birthday of one of them a few days ago. She met us at door. My mom instantly recognized her: "Hey Paula! Happy Birthday!" and gave her present. But I was confused. Despite my mom acting like she knows what she is doing I was still staring at the girl, wondering whatever it is Paula or her sister. And when my mom told me to give her wishes it took me a while of staring before I decided to risk and say it to the girl. Even though I had enough cues I still said the "Best Wishes!" looking around, afraid that "real Paula" is going to come.

Only with strangers really. When I worked in retail, if I had to go and get something from the back for someone, I would emerge from the stockroom and have no idea who I got the item for. Then I would have to use context clues to try and find them. It was horrible.