Recognizing Voices, but not necessarily Faces

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I was at the grocery store earlier today. I was walking down the aisle, looking for something, and I heard a familiar sounding voice say, ?Hi Rocket, How are you doing?. I looked up, saw the person and immediately knew it was Sam. I hadn?t seen Sam in over a year. His daughter and my daughter played soccer together over the years.

The funny thing is this. I am not certain I would have recognized him, if I hadn?t have heard his voice. After all, I wasn?t seeing him in the ?familiar context? (aka in the stands of a soccer game).

I am wondering a couple of things:
- First, is common to those on the spectrum?
- Second, is this related to auditory versus visual memory?

I rely heavily on voices to identify people. I don't think that my natural abilities to recognize voices are unusal, but are due to having to depend heavily on voices to identify people my entire life.

By the way, there was a recent article on phonagnosia -- the inability to recognize voices. There are some people who can't even recognize the voice of their own kids when playing with neighbor kids. One guy said that he didn't realize he had a problem until he was watching a German movie with English voiceovers and they changed whoever was doing the English voice for one of the actors -- he didn't detect the change, but the friend he was watching the movie with sure noticed.

I can recognize who people are by the sound of their voice. I just can't always understand what they are saying. Or figure out if they are talking to me or not.

What's interesting is when I hear a person's voice over the phone, it automatically pulls up a memory of what the person looks like, but the face is blurry.

This happens to me quite often. Many times I recognize people on TV and in movies more by their voices than their faces.

I think I'm equally atrocious at recognizing both.

i have a hard time recognizing faces unless someone has a distinguishing feature. i asked my psychologist about this and he said its probably not because of my autism.

From what I've read, developmental/congenital prosopagnosia appears to be more common in Autism than in the general public. Acquired prosopagnosia, whether by accident or disease, should be equally common in both populations.

familiarity and voices are important in identifying people for me, if someone appears where they are not usually, unless I know them really well, like immediate family there is a 50/50 chance that I won't recognise them or at least not certainly enough to know its someone I know

At one previous job, I frequently had to go to the airport to pick up various employees including the president of the company as well as investors. I would always get there early and wait by the gate for them to come off of the airplane so that I could watch to see which ones seemed to recognize me.

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On another occasion, I asked my younger brother if he had seen my younger brother. That really caught him off guard.

When I moved from Year 11 to Sixth Form (non-Brits: this is the final two years before university, usually one's thirteenth and fourteenth years of full-time education), I stayed at the same school, as did most of my year. Now, instead of wearing school uniform, everyone wore their own suits. As a result, it took me over a month to re-learn to recognise all my friends who I had known for 5 years or more. It was a really stressful time for me anyway, but that made it worse.

I can recognise faces, but often it's a bit of a struggle. I frequently confuse people who have similar hair and heights and facial shapes. I don't recognise my mother out of context (fortunately my father is quite distinctive).

Face recognition is very difficult for me. Last week someone job shadowed me and I later was only able to describe there height, body type , and complexion. There was someone else with a similar description that had a different hair style. I told them it could be her if she had changed her hair style from the day before. I also have a hard time with peoples names. If they have a odd name it is very difficult for me to visualize it. I can someone recognize someone from there voice but not all the time.

I have to see someone a few times before I can recognise their face. I have no trouble remembering their car and if I see them next to their car I can put a name to the face (or Car). This frustrates my wife a bit because I also have a habit of reading number plates out loud, so if I say 'there's Debs car' she not sure of I'm reading a personalised number plate or if it was our friend Deb!

I used to work in a concrete factory where everyone wore sun glasses, yellow work gear and hats. I could never recognise anyone out of their work gear.