Not face blind

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OK, a test said I probably was face-blind however, I don't think I am. The test showed like 20 faces at a time. I have a hard time remembering if lots of pictures/words are presented to me at one time.

I don't think I have face-blindness, yeah sure, if I haven't meant someone very many times and go for 6 months without seeing them, I might not remember them, but I think nearly everyone has trouble recognizing faces sometimes. I have heard that people who have face-blindness usually have a hard time recognizing people they say frequently or know well. I don't have issues with this. Also, say I have a substitute teacher and the same sub returns the next day, I will recognize the sub. Once a sub came to my school and was there for a week, then about a month later, she returned and a knew who she was. (I didn't have this teacher, she subbed for other classes)
There is some people I wish I didn't recognize.

Is it possible to have AS and NOT have face-blindness?

I'm not face blind either, and I have AS. I recognize faces from a mile away. I also remember faces better than I remember names.

It's just a common comorbid. It'd be like saying everybody with autism must have synesthesia or depression... obviously not true.

As for me, I'm faceblind and use hair and clothing as indicators of who someone is, and unless these are very individual I don't often recognize people in other settings where I hadn't originally seen them before.

I'd say it's possible.

A person's face communicates a lot of social information that can be built upon to learn social skills.

But so does tone of voice, verbal understanding, interpretation of metaphors, ability to pay attention in social situations, ability to organize the social information, pretty much any cognitive faculty can relate to absorbing social information because it's just that complex. You might want to check out my thread "Is Difference In General The Cause of Autism?" I've speculated that since every cognitive faculty is in some way related to social skills accumulation that any difference in cognitive functioning is going to result in difficulty with social skills to some degree and people present symptoms diagnosable as ASDs when the amount of "difference" from anywhere in the brain added together is bad enough to create significant difficulty in social situations. It is not necessary to have every "difference" just enough of them.

Even being "faster" at some part of brain functioning could contribute since the person will wind up spending more time in tasks that are helped by that faculty and less time in others. That's why many of us have high IQs. Of course with higher intelligence comes better logical skills that can help a person systemize in order to replace "empathizing"(for lack of a better term), which explains why Aspies who have higher IQs often do better at socializing and are less noticed as "weird" the higher the IQ is(then again wowing people with intelligence is a good way to get them to overlook things they'd otherwise be disturbed by). I'm starting to notice when I actively think about it I'm actually very good at using what I've learned about psychology, sociology, game theory, etc. and applying it to social situations.

I am with Cockney Rebel, I am not face blind at all, but am very poor at remebering names. My visual memory is good, but my auditory memory is poor...when it comes to numbers..even worse.

I have HFA and come from a line of
artists and sculptors. I am an aesthetic thinker and although highly verbal can only make sense of the world through imagery. I am unable to do even simple maths or remember names, but the face and human form fascinates me.

Faces are MY special interest. They delight me. And for that reason I remember all the details of people's faces going back many years. I think I have an almost savant type memory for facial detail.

I'm face blind. I think because I'm such a details person that not remembering a face in as much is an unsettling thing. Also, if someone cuts their hair, wears different clothes or stands in a much lighter place than where I last saw them I won't recognize them.

is faceblindness a black and white thing - either you have it or you don't? or is it a thing that can vary in degree of expression?

i have tested normally on face recognition tests. and some people i have no trouble recognizing. but there are instances where i have tremendous trouble and will be unable to distinguish certain people from each other or fail to recognize someone if they're wearing different clothes etc. i once thought a coworker i had seen every day for a month or two was a new person because he'd gotten a haircut. it's a problem because have trouble recognizing people i am required to know in work situations. i rely heavily on someone's manner of dress, body shape, voice, and things like that. if someone has a very nonspecific haircut or style and does not have one feature that stands out (freckles, bent nose, something like that) i don't know what to "grab" onto to recognize the person.

i don't know if this is a somewhat mild expression of face blindness or if i focus on the details of the person's features and am somewhat unable to see the whole face? or unable to remember it?


it's baffling because it is so easy to recognize certain people it isn't until i am confronted with needing to remember someone who i cannot recognize that i realize how big a problem it is. i read an article about this recently and the woman said "i always recognized people - except when i didn't" and that's how it is.

I don't know. It does take me a long time to learn to recognize someone - typically I have to meet them several times. I'm pretty bad with names as well. But I think this may be just that it takes me a while to incorporate people in my mental world and I only want/need a limited number of social relations.

I remember faces very well but I often don't know where I know them from. I walked by my brother's gf's daughter in the grocery store last week thinking she looked very familiar and it took me a while to realize who she was.

I am to a certain extent. If I'm not expecting to see someone it takes me a couple of seconds to recognize them and I can never pick anyone out of a crowd but I can generally recognize people in pictures.

I do very well with photographs. But with real people, I can have problems remembering faces when I meet people outside the context where I am around them most.

To remember someone, there must be something special about them I can memorize deliberately. Luckily I have a pretty good memory, so "the one who looks like Mrs. Potatohead" or "the one with the bushy eyebrows over eyes that slope down on the outside" is how I remember a face. But if they changed their makeup or hairstyle, I wouldn't know them. Also if two people have similar features but don't look alike, I won't be able to tell them apart. It's the same "All Chinese people look alike" syndrome as some normal people complain of, except with me it doesn't matter what race people are, they all look alike.

I've gotten so practiced at telling people apart by deliberately memorizing minutiae about their features that I recently surprised workers at a cat shelter by being able to tell apart all of the 11 identical-looking black kittens they had there, by memorizing their tiny physical variations.

I'm not at all face blind. Well, when it comes to facial recognition I am not.
I am not good with detecting facial expressions, so I guess that could be a form of 'blindness'.
Now I'm perplexed.