Facial recognition.

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I read a lot about people on the spectrum having a hard time recognising faces but I feel like I have the complete opposite of this.
My mind will instantly find where I've seen a certain face before, it's not something I have to try and do, it's almost like a face I've seen before triggers some kind of response in my brain and it instantly flicks through potential matches and then it finds the correct one, this is all done in a matter of milliseconds. It can be someone as insignificant as someone I've only seen for 5 seconds as an extra on a TV show.
For example, I was just watching a video and a womans face flashed for about 0.5 of a second and my mind instantly pinpointed where I'd seen her before, an episode of House MD and I don't even watch House MD, I just saw a clip on YouTube once. Sometimes it's really annoying if my brain can't pinpoint things 100% perfectly and it'll bug me until it figures it out.
Again, this isn't something I consciously do although I can. It happens all the time and it gets quite annoying actually, especially if I'm watching something and my brain see's several faces it recognises and goes through the "slide-show of face memories" to pinpoint them.

Is this one of those situations where one can be "hyper" or "hypo" in response to facial recognition?

Face blindness, as far as I'm aware, isn't necessarily a "must have" in autism; some people have it, others don't. I recognise faces easily but that doesn't really have any bearing on autism I don't think. I'm not entirely sure, but I don't think it's really part of the criteria.

Maybe there's a link to emotional intelligence but I can't say for certain.

Yeah, like they say, Autism is a spectrum and we all have different traits in different combinations.

Have you tried the Cambridge Face Memory test? It's here:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/psychol ... tartup.php

Apparently the average score is 80%. If you score under 60%, you might be face blind. Guessing randomly would get you about 33%. I managed 38%.

I'm curious to know whether you would score significantly better than the average 80%.

That's a very good point, HighLlama. When I've done tests of recognising expressions from photos, I do pretty well. But in a real social situation, there's often too much sensory input for my attention to cope with; being able to recognise expressions doesn't help if I don't see them to begin with because my attention got focused on an irrelevant detail or I'm ignoring my vision so that I can listen effectively.

I have problems recognizing faces both in real life and on TV shows/films. In RL I often memorize details about a person such as haircolor/style etc when I first meet someone and after a while I can recognize them easier. But if I meet someone without preparation or in an unfamiliar place it may take me a few seconds remember them or I might not at all. I think it also has something to do with eye contact and sensory input. In TV shows or movies I have a hard time following the story if two people look alike (but they don't according to my family). In both cases it helps if they have some feature that is easilly recognizable.

But I often do quite well in face recognizing tests, because I memorize features such as eyebrows, jawline, eyes etc.

I am very bad at recognizing strangers’ faces. If I see the person for a few mins I don’t recognize them later. But if spend more time talking to them - say a half hour then maybe I can recognize them the next day. Although there’s exceptions to that.

I can't tell the difference between Constance Wu and Awkwafina in interviews for the Crazy Rich Asian movie. It doesn't help that they constantly make major changes to their hairstyle and color. Fortunately they gave them very different styles in the movie, and kept them that way, so even faceblind people could tell them apart. Come to think of it I think they intentionally made the characters very different so people who aren't used to Asian faces could better enjoy the movie without confusion.

I'm sometimes okay at facial recognition, sometimes not (especially if I haven't seen the person much before.) It's because of the lack of eye contact situation mentioned by some posters above.

I took the facial recognition test several months ago and scored very low, so I definitely have face blindness (prosopagnosia). I am a pattern thinker. I suspect you might be a visual thinker like Temple Grandin.

Oh, I wish I was better at recognizing faces. It would make life a lot easier. I am face blind and remember being given a test when I was a teenager. They handed me papers with several different but similar-looking faces on it and I was supposed to point out which two were the same person on each page. I remember asking if it was a trick because they were all the same. They assured me that there were no trick questions but I still felt like I was being punked.

It makes people quite upset when you can't recognize them and I've had a lot of uncomfortable moments over it. It's probably strongly linked to a lifelong inability to make eye contact.

It's much easier to recognize people in movies or on TV because I can look at them without them looking back at me. It helps if they have slightly asymmetrical or outstanding features. I confuse actors who are too bland or paint-by-the-numbers conventionally handsome or pretty. Examples: Tom Hiddleston. I could pick him out of a crowd any day because he has slightly asymmetrical features and is more unconventionally handsome. Tilda Swinton is an actress whom I couldn't mistake for anyone else. But I couldn't tell you Chris Pine from Chris Evans. Too much the same. Too perfect.

I'm still bad at tracking who's who at all, especially if it involves names -- face involved or not, visual strengths or not. Eye contact or not.
I no longer cared about names and faces since as early as 4th grade, completely closed off since my worst years, and it's stuck right there even now.

Before that, I was really good at discriminating and memorizing faces and names. Neglected that for the asociality's sake.

So if one had to ask me, I'd likely remember and recognize my kindergarten and earlier elementary classmates and teachers that I haven't seen for a more than a decade, than people whom I more recently met and been longer studying or working with.

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