Memory for faces

Post Reply New Topic

How good are you at remembering faces. I haven't got "prosopagnosia" otherwise known as face blindness but nonetheless I do have a terrible memory for faces, it is almost embarrassing. Unless the person I remember I have met several number of times beforehand usually at least 5 or is incredibly ugly, then that may be a bad sign the person it I can recognise him/her in the street later.

Paul

Very good at remembering faces here.

Tim

I can remember the faces of people I've never seen before.

I'm bad at remembering names, but I'm quite good at faces. For instance, I will forget someone's name, even someone I have met many times if I haven't chatted with them in a while. However, I can see some obscure actor in a film and tell what obscure film I've seen them in before, even though they may have very different hair and make-up. People will think about it a long time and go, "Oh yeah! You're right." I probably won't remember their name though; just where I've seen them before.

I spent about 15 years doing portrait photography and studied the process quite a bit during that time. I learned to look at a pic and determine the feelings that were portrayed and also how to capture certain emotions on film. I've really tried to improve my ability to capture happy emotions, since I could do all the dark ones naturally, it seems.

Part of what I have learned to do includes a fairly complete graphical, and topological assessment of each face I see as it would be presented in 2D with only the lighting techniques to make a more flattering portrayal of the subject. The result of looking closely at a face is that it is permanently stored in 3D in my "picture memory", a trait that I always thought everyone had, until a few years ago.

I don't really have a photographic memory in the sense that those people can exhibit perfect memory, but rather I have an impressionist picture of reality stored as memory. I make memory mistakes with dates and times, but not with faces. I got faces down.

i dont think i hvae any medical inability to remember faces but i know im not very good at it and im always afraid to go up to people the first few times after meting them cause im afraid its not them.

I have trouble when I encounter acquaintances out of their proper context. Say, seeing someone at work at the grocery store or my dentist at the hardware store. If they speak to me, I'm thrown off because not only am I being socially accosted but by someone who seems to know me, which introduces the additional reciprocal expectation of recognition. I can usually fake it, though, since I never address even good friends by their names, by simply smiling and acting unfazed.

I think remembering actores faces are easier,especially if you have seen them in several movies because you spend several hours staring at them....I rarely look at people for more then a few seconds.Sometimes I know I know the face but I dont know from where and no way I could remember their names....I think its because I have so much internal interference"nerviousness," that I cant spend the needed time rembering them...I do wonder if my attration to specific faces isnt because they are easier for me to remember...I like alot of "charactor" and find alot of actors/models...boring and generic....Give me a spock or Dustin Hoffmen any day...

Have I seen you before?

I'm bad at both faces and names. Sometimes a name keeps hanging around in my head and I haven't got the faintest idea who is was again.

I can remember faces connected to situations when I have been in that situation a lot. But usually I'm very poor at recognizing people. I work in a place with over 1000 people, so that is my excuse. Who could remember 1000 people anyway?

Someone can come up to me and ask me for something. I tell them to go back and wait. When I want to help them a few minutes later, I can't remember who asked. It's worse in a crowd of course.

I don't even recognize my parents at once. When I meet my mother, for intance, in a street I notice her because I wonder why that woman is paying attention to me. i look at her then and it takes a few seconds before I recognize her. Slow processing speed I guess

I cannot draw the face of my own child, father, mother or sister if you would ask me and I could draw well. I do see some of their features, so I have an image of them in my mind, but I cannot grab it. If I try to see the eyes of my child I see nothing. If I try to remember my child I see her face fragmented and I see parts of pictures of her that I had on my desktop.

I recognize people by their shape, hair, voice, type of clothes, colours or gait or a combination. I notices that my daughter recognizes people by their type. I'm not sure, but I think she has a problem seeing complete faces too.

PS: Untill last year when I read about prosopagnosia I thought everyone saw it the way I saw it and that they lied when they said different.

On the other hand, if I'm expected to see someone I know well in a crowd I'm often the first to identificate that person.

Yes, I am far better at remembering names, but there have been instances where I failed to even recognize close relatives, How embarrassing

I am horrible at faces and names. When I'm trying to remember to talk to someone later on at school that day, I try remembering them by their outfit or hair. Trust me, I'm so bad at faces that I can be best friends with someone for two years and not even recognize them. And people are constantly saying hi to me in the hallway and the cafeteria and I can't even remember who they are! It's extremely annoying.

I'm not really good at remembering faces, but I'm definitely worse recognizing them, unless I see them fairly often. At school I often think I see someone I've met a few times, but I don't dare greet them just in case.
Once I was at an assembly at school and to my right I saw someone I knew. "Oh, there's A". Then I looked forward. "Oh, there's A. Wait a minute!" And sure enough, A was also where I had seen her first. I still haven't figured out whether they were just similar people or maybe twins. Or I'm prosopagnosic.

I have got a good memory for faces, but I got a really terrible memory for names.
I remember of some years ago, when we had a new person in class, sat next to me, and at a moment I asked again:
What was your name again?
For the fifth time, my name's T.

I think I read in some silly magazine (like Entertainment Weekly or somesuch) that people remember faces as caricatures, most people anyway. Not sure about AS. According to some study, people recognize the caricature faster than the actual face because most people think abstractly. They see the most obvious features of the face exaggerated. Since abstract thinking is a common problem of AS (one of the few things I don't seem to have), maybe that's not the case for many of us.