Non-peripheral vision vs faceblindness

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I'm not sure if I have faceblindness or not, because I know exactly who people are when I look at them. But although I can see what's going on out of the corner of my eyes, I can't seem to see people's faces out of the corners of my eyes.

Last week I had arranged meet my friend in the library, and I walked in, looked around carefully, and couldn't see him anywhere, and I felt like a twat just standing there in the middle of the library. Then I heard someone call my name and I couldn't quite catch which direction it was coming from, until at least I looked to the right and saw him sitting in the corner, and I then walked over to him and felt a bit stupid.

And I see other people seeing eachother straight away. Once I was walking along with my cousin, and a car went by, and my cousin waved to the person in the car (even though she hadn't been looking at the cars). I asked, ''who was that?'' and she replied, ''your next door neighbour.'' And I was like, ''my neighbour? But I didn't see her - how did you spot her so quick even though you don't even know her car or numberplate?'' And my cousin said, ''I just recognised her in the car, I guess.''

It seems that NTs are so sharp with this sort of thing. Can non-peripheral vision and faceblindness be the same thing, or a bit different? I can see things in the corners of my eyes. I can even see if people are looking at me when they walk past me. But I cannot ever see their face or who they are out of the corner of my eyes. It's so frustrating!

I guess we tend to miss a lot of incoming data through our eyes. I have peripheral vision too, and seem getting this issue. At the same time, I don't think it is directly connected to face-blindness. They may share common roots, though.

Thanks Joe, your post had so much in it that I empathize with cause I do the same things. I can't recognize or tell apart my own neighbors cause I'm usually looking at them peripherally, while passing by their houses etc. My mom will say "our new neighbors across the street had a party"and I will be like"what new neighbors?" As far as I knew there was a white family with a few kids there before and there is one now. Apparently they're two different families,

From what I understand, there's two kinds of faceblindness. Basically, there's a part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus, which most people use to recognize faces (and afficianados such as birdwatchers use to recognize their special interest, incidentally).

One type, often caused by brain damage, is when the fusiform gyrus is damaged. Faces get sent there, but not processed. I heard a guy with this type say that he felt like as soon as he looked at a person's face, his brain would just switch off. He could tell it was a face, but couldn't even consciously analyze the features.

The other type is where faces aren't sent to the fusiform gyrus, but instead to less specialized recognition areas. This seems to be common among autistics, probably because we're less obsessed with social things than NTs. In this type, you can recognize faces about as well as a non-geologist can recognize rocks or a non-birdwatcher can recognize birds. In other words, often you can recognize them, but it takes more effort and is less accurate.