What is Face Blindness like for you?

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I don't have face blindness as such but i can't regonise people in crowds, sometimes someone can be very close to me but i don't see them. I don't look at them and not recgonise them, it's that they are just not there.

Thank you, I knew that was spelled wrong. I forgot to correct it.

I have been thinking the same thing, that it likely has to do with how some of use have difficulties or an inability to make eye contact. The research I've been reading to prepare for this presentation has mentioned it as well. Most of the studies I've found use eye-tracking devices to compare ASD individuals to NT individuals. I haven't found many that actually look at the neural activation of ASD individuals when looking at faces, though.

I'm not sure how much psychology you've studied so I apologise if this sounds patronising, but the key area involved in face recognition (and impaired in prosopagnosia) is the 'fusiform face area'/fusiform gyrus, so you might want to search for articles specifically mentioning those regions and autism, it may provide some interesting results.

Speaking of face blindness... I wonder how many people with 'faceblindness' can distinguish between animal faces. For example, recognizing faces has always been extremely difficult for me and not from a lack of looking at faces. IMO (I have not studied this subject) for me this stems from a combination of memory problems and difficulty integrating individual facial features into a whole. On the other hand when I look at animals that are almost identical I have no problem immediately knowing which is which. Even after some time has passed I will almost always recognize the animal again. This occurred to me while looking at your avatar. Most people would not be able to tell the difference between your cat and my cat (visually) because they look so very similar but to me it's night and day.

From the neanderthal theory, I heard face blindness is caused by the fact that we're 'designed' to tell neanderthal faces apart. I don't claim to know whether thats true or not, but its an interesting theory.

Interesting that you should mention animals. Babies can distinguish between monkey faces the same way we distinguish between human faces, but they lose the ability as they develop (suggesting at least some part of face recognition is through nurture rather than genetics). Plus adults are only good at distinguishing between members of their own race, which is why you sometimes hear westerners say (for example) that all asian people look the same - it's not (necessarily) racist, it's just that their skills are honed for western people and they aren't tuned to distinguish between the features that can discriminate between asians. I guess this supports the idea that autistic people are worse with faces due to lack of eye contact. If we don't look at faces we can't learn which features to identify when trying to recognise faces.

I have difficulty recognizing faces. For example other day I was walking to a company that I do some sub-contract work for. I saw someone walking towards me but until she spoke I didn't recognize her even though she has worked for that company for years and I meet her quite often. While I am there I have no problem recognizing her but out of context and wearing outdoor clothes I had no chance. I very often go by clothing or hair but in the above example she had different clothes and a hat.

The deli counter at the local supermarket can be a problem. If the person serving me has to go and get something I have to consciously try to find some identifying features otherwise I won't recognize them when they return.

In crowds I have no chance. One good friend often asks me to come with him to a local auction. If we split up I have real trouble finding him again. Luckily he has fairly distinctive hair and usually wears the same jacket. In town and in crowds I tend to just see people as obstacles to be navigated around or ignored, in just the same way as I would treat a car, a dog or any other moving object. If I am on my own I am likely to be far more interested in an unusual car driving past than any people in my near vicinity.

A while back I took an on-line face blindness test and that was very interesting. I did pretty badly as expected but when I saw the correct names many of the faces seemed to almost change as I suddenly recognized them.

I had face blindness when I was a kid, not recognizing children and teachers at school and sometimes my parents if they got a new haircut or wore new clothes. I am much better at recognizing faces now, and I do it feature-by-feature, analytically comparing the face in front of me to the face in my memory, all without the feeling of recognition when I am not familiar with them. If most people can consistently recognize someone after seeing them three times for a few minutes at a time, then I can do it after seeing them ten times for an hour at a time. It just takes more exposure for me. I do great on tests of face memory, because you only have to remember a face that you saw minutes or seconds ago instead of last week or last month.

I'm as good at telling humans apart as I am at telling apart trees, or cats, or cars. That is: I'm detail-oriented, and I notice small things; but humans don't really trigger any special abilities to me. It's always been quite amazing to me that people can talk to someone for twenty minutes and then recognize them a week later.

When I did a prosopagnosia test online (I can't remember where it was, sorry) I actually scored the same for face recognition as for object recognition. So my best guess is that I am using my "objects-in-general" system to recognize faces with. It's a make-do approach, but better than nothing. I can recognize people I know very well and have known for years, but I couldn't, for example, recognize a classmate I met in the cafeteria.

I'm meeting a bunch of said classmates in the library for study time. I hope they have their textbooks out, because I'm going to be looking for "two African American girls and one blonde white girl and a gray-haired male professor, all holding Perception textbooks". If I can't find that, then I'll just have to hope they recognize me!

Regarding races: I can tell apart African American and white, but Mexican or middle-eastern and white are really hard for me to tell apart; for that matter, people who are "black" but have light skin won't look "black" to me, and there are some people from India who are really dark too. I can tell apart Asians because of their eyes, usually. So, race is a useful cue to me only for black people and Asians and blonde or red-haired white people. Other than that, I just think "uh, yep, that's a human being all right," and start looking for hairstyles, jewelry, voice patterns, and such. Sometimes I can tell where they are from because they have an accent. We have lots of people from India at my school, because they are studying science in the US.

I've also found myself getting to know lots of physically disabled people. Of course part of this is the shared experience of disability; but I wonder whether it might not also be that they are more distinctive than most people and there are more cues, so I can recognize them and am more likely to say hello when I see them.

Like other people have mentioned in previous posts, I have trouble remembering faces as well when attending customers even if I spoke to them earlier that day...it's even happened minutes before I attended them. I think it might be because I'm not even focusing on them, but more on my job and thinking patterns to avoid screwing up, but it has happened with acquaintances as well. One time an acquaintance that I've seen at parties several times before came up to me and said hi and I gave her a weird look because I didn't recognize her. She had cut her hair really short, so I stared at her and said hi awkwardly, and she gave me a weirded out look and walked away. As soon as she walked away I remembered who she was.

Face blindness means you just can't remember names with faces very well. It's embarassing.

I am pretty sure that DS has faceblindness - particularly in adults. Even last year at kinder it took him around 8 months before he could differentiate between children in his class (admittedly, many many of them are blonde haired, blue eyed little people - even I got confused). Before the diagnosis, I couldn't understand what was going on and I admit, I got embarrassed that he would ask me who someone was, when he should be well aware.
Does anyone know whether/ how I can help him with this?

This is something that I don't really tell people since it can be insulting to people, but it was the worst when I worked in retail. Just like other people were saying, when you greet a customer multiple times, they tend to get a little upset and offended. It can make you look really stupid as well. That combined with only being able to read specific facial expressions like Happy, Sad, or Mad, kind of gets really annoying in every day life situations during conversations to both you and the person you are speaking with if you are always asking them if they are mad or something.

+1

I once failed to recognize my cousin out in public, and he was mad. He thought I was just ignoring him, he says I looked right at him and I don't even remember it. Very extreme case, probably would never happen again.

But in general, this applies to me. I won't recognize the majority of acquaintances outside of their "assigned" places, I will USUALLY recognize friends and family but it's not instantaneous.

I'm undiagnosed, but I found what asperger was while searching for face blindness in google.

I can see faces (I'm not apperceptive) but I find difficult to remember and describe them, once my mum asked me about how a girl looked like, I said she has two eyes,a nose and a mouth, I didn't realize how stupid it sounded until I heard myself saying it, my mum thought I was joking. I would like to find some book about classifiyng facial features. Sometimes I forgot making eye contact, but I still have problems remembering faces if I look at them with the intention of remembering.
I have been like this since I can remember, here are some examples:

1) I was with my grandmother at shopping, we payed for a toy and the seller went to look for something. I didn't remember how she looked like, I was afraid she didn't come back and I had lost my money, fortunatelly she came back and talked with us.

2) When I'm at a restaurant, I never know which was my waiter, because they dress the same and use to have the same hairstyle.

3) My mother used to pick me up from school, once she changed her hairstyle and I couldn't find her at the exit, after some minutes I noticed there was a woman wearing her clothes and my sister's bag, I was unsure so I stared at her for about 5 minutes, then my sister took my hand and asked why I was staring at my mother.

4) One guy started talking me in the street in a friendly way, so I supposed he was someone whose face I had forgotten, I knew I was wrong when he asked me for buying a religious magazine.

5) I was coming back home and I saw a girl with a poodle, I was looking at the dog and then the girl say me "hello" with an angry voice, I say hi back unsure(maybe she got angry because she doesn't like people watching her dog?) and continued my way to home. Days later my mother told me that the neighbor's sister was offended because I didn't say hi to her when we meet, then I knew she was the girl with the poodle.

6) I have problems making friends at college because I don't remember who was the one I sat by the day before, but I made some because once I sat by a guy with colored eyes and I could find him the day after (I looked for green eyes until someone greeted me), then he showed me his friends.

7) I've recently became an assistant at one of my college's courses, I had to help some group of students with programming. One group asked me some questions, I answered and then went to lunch, when I came back I wanted to know if they needed more help, but there were a lot of students and I couldn't recognize them, I just stayed in corner looking at everyone waiting for someone to approach me...

8 ) Sometimes I'm not sure if someone is who I think who is, I spent 15 minutes trying to notice if one guy was my boyfriend, he wasn't.

9) I also have problems watching movies, I use to recognize the characters by their hair or skin colors, when there are for example two blonde women I have problems knowing who is who. That happens to me in real life too, two of my friends at school looked the same for me at the firsts week because they both have the same hair color (now I notice how diferent they are)

I'm not bad with recognising a face but DO have a problem matching a name to it. That comes eventually after repeated exposure to that face and hearing the name several times. Then it sticks.

Or not