Did you know how NTs see things is different from us!?

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Hi I've just read in a manga comic about the writer's autistic boy and found out something mind-blowing so I came back to this forum after years of absence!! Roughly translated, It said this:

"Autistic people fully focus on one thing when they look at something and the background becomes out of sight. My son does this. He looks at my left eye, then my right, and then my mouth. He always looks at me this way."

My first reaction was like "What? How else can you see stuff????", but as I read on I started to realise this: It means the NTs don't usually do this!! !! ! Isn't that surprising? Or do you think it's even true? Is this manga writer mistaken? I often find it a little uncomfortable thinking which part of people's faces I should look at, so sometimes I'd look at one eye and then shift to the other, but sometimes I can relax enough not to worry about it, I think. I can't imagine how else you can see something. That is weird.

Mind you even though I can now look at people's eyes when I talk to them it's still always a little uncomfortable, though luckily I don't get that feeling of absolute terror I felt when I started to force myself make an eye contact because my primary school teacher told me to - but that's another subject.

Anyway, I looked (suitably to the topic of this thread (≧∇≦) ) but couldn't find another thread discussing this difference between us and the NTs so I hope you can tell me your thoughts or information. How do your eyes focus when you look at something? If there's any NT people around could you share your experience too please?

I'm not sure if this is related, but just in case it is and helps us find out some more on this, let me add that I have trouble remembering people. I very often have problem recognizing their faces, remembering their names, or linking names to faces. Sometimes if someone I don't regularly talk to cut their hair my mind thinks it's a stranger. I remember my family and friends' faces though, though it can be a little difficult to spot them in photos (not always, just occasionally). Then again I can sometimes remember a stranger I've only seen once in a street or at the other end of an office a whole year ago or something. Has this anything to do with the eye focus thing?

Your reply would be very much appreciated. Please tell me!! Is this even true?

I can and do see more than just one detail at a time and backgrounds don't actually disappear for me, but I always tend to zone in on one detail at a time. I find that to be very natural and relaxing. I am Autistic. The NTs that I know can and sometimes do see small details but they don't automatically zone in to them at the rate that I do. I tend to do it much much more and in much more detail and I zone in on much smaller details than the NT's that I know. For example, I am really good at identifying infant carpet beetles. They will easily go unnoticed by my NT friends and family. But I will zone in on them like a carpet beetle predator.

If I am looking at a face though, I will usually find a freckle or something like that and zone in on it. If I make eye contact, it's always both eyes. But I will spend more time looking at the mouth than at the eyes.

The way NT's see things is typically through a "hypnotized" manner for what the "main-stream" sources permit them to see. Not on television ? Does not exist in the movies ? Then the NT be all like, naw, man, that can't be real, otherwise you'd be hearing them talk about it all over the news...

Yes, it's true. We NTs blend most of what we see into an overall average perception, most of the time, refined by our social and environmental training. I went to this talk once on autism-spectrum conditions, and they had this test that usually Aspies pass and NTs fail, where they showed a series of cartoon faces and you had to guess (or remember), at the end, which of the two faces you saw in the series. I had a vague idea of what this test was about, and I managed to pass it, but it was NOT because I remembered any of the specific faces I saw. However, I remembered that certain features of the cartoon faces were never found together: most specifically, short faces with thick eyebrows. Hence, I ruled out the "average" face that the vast majority of my fellow NTs picked as the one they thought they saw. That was still a pretty NT way to solve the test, though, because I was still only remembering in terms of general categories like short faces vs. long faces and think eyebrows vs. thin eyebrows. I was just dividing this up more finely than usual.

Standard NT perception also probably helps with face recognition, because faces are remembered as a whole, although we vary individually in our ability to match faces with names, distinguish similar faces, etc. I usually recognize faces before names. But I may not be quite as good as some of my peers in distinguishing similar faces. I told my identical twin cousins apart by a certain detail in the pattern of the freckles on their faces because I could only sometimes see the slight differences in their eyes or overall facial expression that the rest of their friends and family went by, and when their freckles faded (and I spent much less time with them) I lost the ability to tell them apart. Nearly every other fellow NT who knows a set of identical twins fairly well says they simply "look different," and that different look seems to be anchored in the usual features we use to distinguish faces. On the other hand, many of my fellow NTs claim that people of a specific racial or ethnic group other than their own "all look alike" to them, whereas I don't find members of other races/ethnicities to look any more alike than any two fellow White people. So our ability to distinguish faces is sensitive to social context as well: we can stink at it with people who are not in our inner circle and be uncannily good at it with those who are.

We NTs live in the Matrix. What we see and how we see is far more contingent on our upbringing and social experience than we tend to realize, unless we're psych geeks. It's quite spooky, really. We can even muddle our own correct perception under peer pressure, though we don't always do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conf ... xperiments

I didn't notice my NT wife changed the living room drapes for a couple of months. Does that fit into the background piece?

That is actually quite an impressively honest self-analysis (now to add a "Adam ruins everything" type of remark to the end : for a(n) NT/girl... ;o). Yes, NTs typically live in Matrix-Land, and it's near-impossible to get most of them to see how they live in a world full of deception. I see that you have made a Wikipedia-Reference (not that there aren't spectrum-members who also do that here a lot). I think even autistics can get fooled by it a lot, too, but usually more so in the case of the "controversial" subjects (the kinds that fool both NTs and Spectrumers alike)... Wikipedia started out good/decent, but was quickly taken over and hi-jacked by dis-information agents, and you have to remember, that even if the first-generation could be trusted to build an infra-structure that benefited society, that is no guarantee the the 2nd or 3rd or 4th generations of decision-makers will still be able to continue making wise decisions that are any longer of benefit to society with said infra-structure, and leaders of any promising enterprise could end up being replaced by crooks and deceivers who muddy the waters even further into forcing the Matrix into an ever-growing cancer-like expansion... such as through astro-turfing...

I'm not officially diagnosed and am still doing some investigation and evaluation on myself, but I have always narrowed my focus to one particular aspect of a person's face when they're talking. I actually find that I usually need to look at someone's face to hear what they're saying, but I don't always look at their eyes. If I do, it's someone I'm familiar with, and I'll narrow my focus on one particular eye at a time. If I feel I've stared at that eye for too long, I move to the other. If I'm too uncomfortable to look someone directly in the eyes, I'll look at their nose or their mouth, or a defining feature on their face like a zit, mole, freckle, scar, etc. if they have any. My eyes will immediately zone in on a defining feature or blemish if it's unusual from other people's faces. Almost to the point where I can't even get it out of my head after we part ways.

As far as facial recognition goes, I've always struggled. I can never see a person's face in my head no matter how long I've known them. Only small details. Like my wife's brown eyes and fair eyebrows, or my daughter's little slopey expression when she smiles and crinkles her own eyes. Those types of things. If a person I haven't seen in a while changes their hair color, haircut, or gains or loses weight, I have absolutely no idea who they are. My uncle's wife, who used to have thick brown hair several years ago, bleached it totally blonde recently, and when she arrived at my wedding hanging off my uncle's arm, I'd honestly thought he'd remarried or something. I had no idea who she was until two hours into the wedding when someone called her by her name. Every school year while I was still in high school, I would forget what my friends looked like, and would have no idea who they were if they changed things about themselves over the summer. It wouldn't be until they'd call out my name or tell me flat out who they were that I would remember. I got flack for it a lot and was called a serious flake.

I'm very much a "detail" person, though I've not thought about the visual dimension of it before, I've only really noticed it as a thinking style. I'll be thinking about a topic and my brain will lock in on a detail, essentially changing the subject completely, so that if I'm trying to explain a thing to somebody, I fear I may never get to my original point - one by one the tangential details capture my imagination, and my attention becomes superglued to them until I've thought them through. The overview falls by the wayside. I've made some progress in learning to temper it, but nothing like enough. Lousy short-term memory really doesn't help, or perhaps it's the hyperfocus on the details that antagonises my memory of the original purpose of the train of thought.

Visually, I don't think it happens so much, but it's there. I noticed it was something I had to be careful about when I learned to drive, as I'd see one specific hazard approaching and I'd fix my gaze on it, becoming oblivious to everything else, but once I realised how dangerous that was I soon adapted and acquired the habit of remaining alert to the whole environment. I think I've had a number of collisions outside of vehicles, it would be typical of me to trip over a dog while carefully watching a precariously-balanced plate of cakes, but again I've made some progress. I guess I've also mitigated that kind of problem by taking control over my environment and making sure the gangways are clear and stuff isn't too near my elbows etc. I used to wonder why people tolerated such dangerously cluttered homes and workplaces and how they got away with it without having more accidents.

I can't really see more than one of a person's eyes at the same time. I have trouble taking in "face data," and drastic changes in hairstyles can throw me. I guess I'm using different cues of identity to those that most folks use. When I look in the mirror, I see a different person every time. But in movies I frequently recognise actors I've seen before. It can take me a long time to recall their names, and I find that if I stop trying to remember, the names will often pop into my head later as if by magic.

A while ago I saw an interesting graphic of a big letter S made out of a bunch of tiny H's. I would like to find it and post it here but I can't remember where I saw it. It was said that NTs would tend to notice the big S first and those with autism would tend to notice the H's first, and unsurprisingly I noticed the H's first and didn't realize that they made up a big S until looking at it for a few seconds. It was quite interesting.

It sounds like the OP has prosopagnosia. It's both the reason you can't recognize people, and the reason you don't tend to gaze at their whole face to get a gestalt the way an NT would.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia

Little eye contact and I tend to look at other parts of the face, especially at the mouth.
Sometimes I miss the larger picture. I might not notice things like how someone changed their hairstyle or stuff like that, but I might notice smaller details.