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Atypical Visual Saliancy in Autism Spectrum Disorders Quantified through Model-Based Eye Tracking

Hmm. I don't think I have that.
I have overall bad visiion.
Yet no problems with recognizing faces.

Heh, I have the opposite... 20/20 vision, but can't recognize my own family members unless they're in my house, and then I manage to deduce who they are.

I finally figured out that I memorize people by their hair style. I'm totally screwed when people change their hair. I don't know if I look at things more than people. But I can feel my eyes get wider when I see tech things, because I get excited/happy to see them. I don't get that seeing people.

Terrible difficulty recognizing faces here. If I meet someone, and I see the person again (and again, and again), I won't be sure it's the same person...I have a somewhat familiar feeling, I KNOW I've seen the person before but I have embarrassed myself before thinking someone was a different person, etc.

I just had this recently with the woman who organizes my son's IEPs, and has done so for the past seven years, yes, literally seven years...saw her on campus but not in her usual room and I said "Hi" but not "Hi (her name)" because what if I was wrong and I had the wrong person in mind? I am actually still not 100% certain that was her...she waved and perked up immediately when she saw me so I DO know it was definitely someone I know, and her "stand-out" (for me) characteristics matched...hair, very thin body type.

I have often wondered how people give descriptions for police sketches. That mystifies me. I have tested myself by trying to recall one of my children's faces (my children are my life, BTW) and I took one of my sons and attempted to describe him (mentally, I wasn't sitting there talking to myself ). A couple of things came to mind: very large eyes...pointy chin...and I could "see" his hair in my mind...but those "more stand-out" (for me) features were all I could actually mentally see clearly; the rest of his face sort of blended into the back of the mental image. What I do recognize about people usually relies on one or two characteristics that make me "recall" them later, like the lady's hair and body type above, and my son's very big eyes and little elfin chin.

I have visual perception issues in general. My depth perception is terrible and I easily trip over rocks and the like because I think I can see where they are but I tend to misjudge even looking right at them. Can't catch a ball (not sure where it's going to land near me), etc. I also tend to "blank out" and not be able to interpret anything if there are loads of visual details all in one place. On top of all this, I am very nearsighted and now, with age, am both nearsighted and farsighted. Vision and visual stuff has never helped me at all in life, I feel like at this point I should just give it all up and get a cane and dark glasses.

I tried that once, with hilarious results. Someone was trying to break into my apartment through the sliding glass door, and I described him to the police as tall, slender, blond hair, blue eyes... They took his fingerprints, found the guy, and he turned out to be short, stocky, and hispanic.

In retrospect I think I associated "scary stranger at my door" with Alexander Skarsgard (who plays a vampire in True Blood) - and so in my mind, this guy looked like that. (Oops!)

The professor of this research just talked about these findings in class yesterday.
There was plot was NT and autistic focusing on different aspects of images over time.
NTs focused more and more on social things over time, with higher slope of social focus vs. time graph.
Autistics also focused more on social things over time, but slope was quite a lot lower.
NTs focused less and less on low-level salient features such as bright objects, e.g. someone's white shirt or light colored wall of building, and autistics had same trend, but again shallower slope.

I would be panic stricken if I was asked to describe someone.

I remember distinguishing features like beards or long hair on men.

Also I remember things like if someone was wearing red socks or an interesting tie for instance.

Apart from that i think most people look the same.

Commenting to look at closer later...short on time now. I think my hubby would say i have this. I often don't recognize faces i should, or know i should know someone by looking at their face...but don't. Has caused teasing at best, hurt feelings in some situations. Often when we are watching a movie i will think i recognize an actor from somewhere else but i would say that at least 80% of the time i am wrong. I just never realized it was a quantitative, studied thing.

I agree - it causes hurt feelings. That really bothers me. People think they "just don't matter" to you if you don't recognize them...it's so hard to explain it all...and if you open a dialogue of "I have a condition called..." then THEY lose interest, you can see the eyes glazing over and the "Oh great, another 'invented' 'excuse' 21st century malady..." so...I just really dislike when this happens.

I have always hated this and it makes me pretty miserable when it happens and it can be even worse when the person acts forgiving, I don't know...guilt. You know what's also truly awful? When this happens but it's with a person of a specific race or culture, and you accidentally call the person the name of another person of the same race/culture (again just because of not really being able to recognized faces). It's not a bigotry thing at all, but damn, I am sure it seems like it...I have done that once, just once...and I can tell you I wanted to die right there on the spot. There's no way to backtrack after something like that and say, "It's not a racial thing, it's any characteristic, so for example if you had red hair or were very tall or..." because the damage is already done. He thinks you're compartmentalizing him or that you're thinking "all people X look/act the same" or whatever, something really, really awful and inappropriate and "minimizing" like that and it's just impossible to make the person understand - or it was in my case...I still cringe any time I remember that and it was 7 years ago.

ETA: Also, certain descriptions others use really confuse me. One that comes immediately to mind is "almond-shaped eyes." WTH? Doesn't EVERYBODY have almond-shaped eyes? What other shape is there? I've never seen a person with perfectly circular eyes or rectangular eyes. Or with parallelogram eyes. (Although that might be kind of neat). That REALLY confuses me. Also, "olive skin." I have never seen a green person. Other people are seeing things in these designations that are identifying - but I just don't.

Last edited by NowhereWoman on 29 Oct 2015, 12:10 pm, edited 3 times in total.

This. This happened recently when a man sat next to me at the train station. He asked some question and I answered him and then he began to talk about more and more personal things. Finally I had to say, "excuse me, but do I know you?" Turned out he was a neighbor from down the block. I didn't mean to be rude, I just did not recognize him at all. He seemed to take it as some kind of insult. My admission that I am bad with faces did not assuage his feelings, as far as I could tell.

Aww. Sweetie.

((Adamantium))

So this is a measure of what people look at when presented with a picture, both initially and then as time goes by? As in, NT people will immediately focus on the only face in the picture even if it is off to the side & in the background, and they'll spend more time looking at it, while AS/ASD people will generally focus more on the geographical center of the picture (or conversely the image as a whole)?

And they say *we* have singular, narrow focuses or interests...

(snicker)

Autistics and NTs both focus more on faces than low-level salient features, but at end of trials (I forgot how long, but at least several seconds they must be), NTs focus somewhat more on faces, and autistics focus somewhat more like other features. If you plotted individual looks onto pictures or videos, NT and autistic results appear much the same, as both groups have generally same looking pattern, but more subtle group difference can be quantified by dividing up regions in pictures and analyzing data over time. Time course is usually useful in gaze research, because it can reveal more subtle differences that total fixation on trial would not show. Both NTs and autistics are focused on faces, but NTs are more focused on faces. This research shows group difference in visual attention for complex stimuli.

Is that a virtual hug? If so, thanks for the kind gesture.

FWIW, I think this problem of recognition is part of prosopagnosia, which the pattern in the study may relate to, but isn't the same thing.

Ha, ha, i too used to look for green ppl too when someone referred to "olive skin." I also have a terrible time distinguishing differences in faces of someone of a different race from myself. And it is not racism in my case either--it is visual.

Case in point--I am from the U.S. in an area with a low population of ppl of Asian descent. We hosted guests from Korea on several occasions through a program at our local college. It was a fairly large group of Korean guests--maybe 40-50? Anyway, when they arrived and hosts were being paired with their guests, i always had to remember my guests by what they were wearing or bags they were carrying. I could not distinguish facial differences when the Korean guests were all together in a group. By the time the weekend was over, i knew my own guests of course. When the group came back together i was also better able to distinguish differences in the other Korean guests even though i had not spent the weekend with them. But i had become more accustomed to the Asian features. Again, not a racism issue in the least (or else i would not have invited them into my home!). But you are right, it sounds terrible. Actually, i have never told anyone about my difficulty with this because i thought it sounded so mean of me. It makes me feel a bit better to know that it isn't meanness and that someone else has had the same experience. (although i am sorry you struggle with it too)