face blindness - can you be partially face blind?

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^ Somewhat related; if I'm used to seeing someone in a certain uniform and I see them in their civilian clothes, I'm unlikely to recognize them.

It isn't as bad as not recognising friends.
When I bought a house in a new area, I didn't recognise my next-door neighbour even after a number of conversations.
He was surprised, and so was I.

But it is a simple disability, so I don't see any embarrassment in it.

I never heard of face blind, what is it?

Is when you can see someone who knows you well but you don't know who they are, because when you normally see the people you associate the people with the place that you normally see them, as your mind remembers the place and who is at the place, but does not remember their faces to know who they are if one meets them somewhere else such as walking in a street.

Having trouble recognising faces.
If it is bad, you even have difficulty recognizing close friends.

I heard of a situation when a friend was wearing a jacket, came back from the toilet without wearing it, and the person with face blindness didn't recognise the person.

I have not recognised my own Mum and my little brother and it was onlymy little brother tugging at my Mums hand that I realized that he knew me, and as my Mum also has faceblindness, she past me as well and we said "Hello" as we passed. So I went through my mind of all the people I knew to try to match who I saw to them and it was ages after when I realized it was my Mum and my brother who was about three years old at the time.

Have once had a break while working on the trains, nipped into the town for 20 minutes and hurried back. On the way back some guy started talking to me who I did not knkw who it was,so I said "Do I know you?"
He said "Its me! I'm your driver! We were working together 20 minutes ago!" He had put a coat on to nip out and it was not a railway coat so I did not know him.

Often times I don't recognize people in a different context

I definitely have developmental partial prosopagnosia. I can learn faces, but it takes at least a few exposures, often numerous exposures, before my brain firmly encodes them with reasonable accuracy.

For example, I remember watching Monty Python's Flying Circus a lot when I was in third grade (~1980) and feeling vaguely annoyed and discomfited by my knowledge that I was watching the same four or five guys over and over again, yet was incapable of telling them apart because they kept switched wigs, mustaches, costumes, etc. I only gradually learned to distinguish between them reliably after years of watching their movies and reruns.

My wife (who is particularly good at facial recognition—as in, is probably two-or-so standard deviations above the mean) is amazed and amused at how often I'll ask her who a given TV/film actor is. She'll then list all of the roles I've seen him or her in before. Sometimes this triggers a strong, immediate sense of recognition; sometimes it elicits only a broad, vague sense of recognition; other times I continue to draw a blank.

She (my wife) and I have a standing agreement that she'll testify to people about my borderline prosopagnosia in the event I fail to recognize an acquaintance, especially a person of color (we're both white), or in any similarly potentially offending social situation. She also helps me out socially by preëmptively calling people by name and sometimes mentioning the first or most recent time we met.

Please pardon this slight tangent, but I'd like to offer up one last curiosity: In my dreams, which are often highly detailed, complex and vivid, I often see the faces of public or historical figures—but almost never the faces of my wife or children or other close family members or my two BFFs from middle school. That's odd right? I figure it must be related to my ASD and prosopagnosia, but I can't really think why, exactly. I wonder if anyone else here has a similar or analogous experience with faces in dreams?

That sound scary. I wish other people make sense here, they talk like they using big words, my reading & understanding level is not great, you two make sense. I experienced when my mom didn’t recognize me, it was so scary, but it was something else, it was West Nile that causing it, I so hated that she got West Nile

It is only with people that really know you that you can forget them? Can it get better so you can recognize them again? Is this common condition?

Like most measurable human traits, facial-recognition ability follows a bell-curve distribution. Most people cluster around the average, while out in the tails of the bell curve, you find people who are exceptionally good or exceptionally bad at it.

At the high end, former president Bill Clinton can apparently put a name to a face without skipping a beat even if he only met the person one time decades ago. At the other end there are people who can't even recognize their own faces in mirrors and pictures, never mind their family members or closest friends. Several celebrities are on record as having degrees of moderate congenital prosopagnosia, e.g. Jane Goodall and Brad Pitt.

(BTW congenital, i.e. from-birth prosopagnosia, is distinct from acquired prosopagnosia. When it is acquired, it is due to brain damage, e.g. from strokes or dementia.)

Among the autistic population, there is a higher incidence of congenital prosopagnosia. You can think of it as us have our own separate bell curve: It overlaps the NT bell curve, but is shifted to the left (i.e. in the direction of worse face recognition). Of course you can still find plenty of autistic persons in the right-hand tail of the distribution, where facial-recognition faculties are good or excellent. But at the broad population level, there is a positive correlation between ASD and higher degrees of prosopagnosia.

I'm dx with face blindness (Prosopagnosia).

I could recognise my kids or family members by their face alone without hair or body in the picture but I can't "picture" their faces very well in my mind, and I'd have a hard time describing them in words without looking.

Everyone else: I can recognise some very familiar people by their whole self (body, hair, clothes, etc.) but I doubt I'd know them by their facial features alone. It took me a few times meeting my partner to even recognise him in public because his clothes changed and he wore different winter hats. I can't tell my brother's two stepsons apart and I've known them quite a few years, even though I don't see them often.

Movie stars etc: I don't watch enough movies to know any actors except for my very favourites, and those ones I know more from staring at google pictures than from watching them in motion in movies.

I don't make eye or face contact with people so that probably plays a big role.

Some really interesting stuff in this thread and a lot I can relate to.

Particularly not being able to 'picture' people's faces in their mind. I can't do this at all. I can often picture a very specific detail - like a smile, or a movement around the eye, but not a whole face.

And I too have struggled to recognise my own family out of context, or when I don't expect them. I sometimes wonder if I'd recognise my own kid, in a crowd. I can't picture her in my head right now. That's a little sad.

I've also on several occasions thought I recognised people and started talking to them before realising that I don't know them at all, they're complete strangers.

I do also wonder how much of this is down to avoidance of eye contact. Do I not know what people look like because I don't look at them much?

I wonder the same

faceblind official organization website has lots of good info. https://www.faceblind.org/research/

I didn't know I had this until after I got autism diagnosis at age 68 3 years ago! finally an explanation for my stupidity about recognizing others! I have to look at what my husband is wearing and note it so I don't lose him if we are separated in the grocery store or other big place.

I certainly feel "partially face blind." I tend not to recognise people when I don't expect to see them, and occasionally when I do expect to see them if it's been a while. (Example: my mother and I completely failing to spot each other at the railway station). I also have near zero ability to recognise famous actors in different roles.