Face Recognition: Context-Dependant?

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I find this an interesting phenomenon.

I am aware there is a ongoing discussion pertaining to face-recognition.

However, I have noticed, throughout my life, something which fascinates me:

If a person is in uniform every day, I'll recognize the person. Out of uniform, I don't tend to recognize the person who I see in uniform every day. This has given wise to accusations that I believe one particular race "all look alike."

For me, it depends on the context. I might recognize a person at work, but I might not recognize the same person in the supermarket.

In your experience, does face-recognition depend upon specific contexts?

Very much so. If I only know someone from one environment I will not recognize them in another. This has led to some embarrassment and unintended offense on my part.

For me it is both context dependant and fluctuates with some inner conditions that I don't really understand. I think it may be that there are times when I am in some sort of partial shut-down from sensory overload and in that state all my abilities are impaired and I don't recognize people at all.

I have offended people because I did not recognize them out of context and someone from work who I ran into in a Duane Reade and did not recognize me actually laughed at me in an unkind way because of my confusion.

I lost a friend at Columbia University because I was in one of those states and I had stopped to rest on the path near Butler/the student union. He approached me and I could not identify him but I didn't want to admit that I was in an impaired state that I did not understand, so I tried to BS my way through the encounter and guessed the wrong name... I think he thought I was high.

I wish I had been secure enough to be honest. I wish I had known about autism then. I like to think that if I had known, I would not have spent some much time thinking of these things as shameful personal failings.

This is me as well. I believe it's because I use things other than the face itself to recognize people (body shape, height, hair shape/style, clothing, context, etc.). I didn’t immediately recognize my Mom one day, because I was in a place that I didn’t expect to see her.

Me too. I had the same experience even with my mother who I see every day. But when I don´t expect her to be at an specific place I don´t recognize her fast. It is like a process then: This person calls my name => she knows me, then I look at the clothes and other stuff. Furthermore I am better at recognizing the voice of a person. But that´s a part of "other than the face" I guess.
On the other side it can be that I don´t really recognize differences about the faces when I already know who I am talking to. I don´t think about that then and so I miss for example that the person has shorter hair now. If I meet the person with shorter hair in an unexpected context it can nevertheless be that I won´t recognize her because then I need that information.

Not for me. I'm bad at facial recognition in general, but once I know a face, context doesn't usually matter. I notice that I actually have the most trouble recognizing white males. I don't have too many problems with other races. It kind of makes it easier for me because I don't live in a very diverse place.

The term is prosopagnosia. It is generally thought to be due to problems in the right fusiform gyrus of the brain.

I have a great many problems with it. I can recognize people I work with every day at work. I may or may not recognize them elsewhere. I don't know of anyone who I would recognize if I was walking down the street in some remote city, say Duluth, Minnesota, and encountered them.

It is a bit easier if it is a couple since there is twice the information.

One of my primary means of recognizing people is their voice. If I was walking down the street in Duluth, Minnesota and encountered someone I know and they spoke to me, I would typically recognize them relatively fast.

I don't even recognize family members if they don't say anything and I encounter them where I don't expect to encounter them. Once when I was twenty, I asked my younger brother if he knew where I could find my younger brother. The question really surprised him. As soon as he said something, I recognized him.

At one previous job, I often went to the airport to pick people up and drive them back to my office. That included not only the president of the company and other employees, but also big investors in the company. Since I couldn't recognize them, I would stand near where they came off of the airplane and watch to see who would recognize me. Since I couldn't recognize them, it was up to them to recognize me.

If I'm in a store with someone, I tend to get really upset if we get separated because I don't know if I will be able to recognize them again -- usually they have the same hair style and clothing as when we entered the store and that really helps. But there have been a number of occasions where I would walk very quickly up and down the aisles watching carefully every time I crossed an aisle to see if I could find them in the aisles.

I have no recollection of what my parents looked like. Or my grandparents. I do have a picture of my parents and I know they are my parents when I see the picture, but it is essentially the picture I recognize, not the people in it.

So my primary methods of recognizing people is by context and voice. After that, in no particular order, is hair style, clothing, height, girth, mannerisms, and gait.

When I moved from Year 11 to Year 12 at school, everyone stopped wearing uniforms and wore their own suits instead. I really struggled to recognise people at what was already a stressful time.

Fortunately I don't have it as bad as some of you seem to, but I definitely have problems where I mix up people of similar heights etc., and this has become more apparent with age. It's most embarrassing when mixing up two black people or two East Asians.

For a nice essay on prosopagnosia, read one at http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/23/faceblindness-prosopagnosia-kate-szell-wellcome-trust-science-writing-prize-face-blindness.

Follow the link to read the complete essay.

It used to be thought that this was due to a deficit in part of the visual cortex at the back of the brain. Recent neuroscience has disproved that theory - and that's all it was - a theory that was wrong.

Context is an issue. It is also thought that a large part of the issue with face recognition is that ASD people spend less time looking at and therefore remembering faces.

I have always had this problem, even with people who are close to me, so I was really pleased and startled yesterday when I recognized a man walking by my home, who is a groundskeeper where I work. But I recognized him not first by his face, but by his height and unusual way of walking, hunched over on one side.

I have a really hard time with my neighbors, and that leads to the race-related accusations you mention. Most of my neighbors are African-American, and many of them are related (cousins, grandparents, uncles, etc.) so they have a family resemblance, and I never see many of them together, so I can't easily find a means of differentiating. There are several young women about the same age and I can't possibly tell who is whom. It is embarrassing because they all know me immediately, and once when I tried to explain that I was face-blind it was met with some degree of skepticism.

I too get very upset when I lose track of someone in a store, and my husband gets annoyed by it because he will go off to another aisle to look for something, and I start looking for him frantically and panic when I can't find him, even though I apparently "looked straight at him" several times during my search. I have to memorize what people are wearing, and if they take off a coat or sweater, I'm hopeless.

Especially in the first couple of years of our marriage, I would have a hard time recognizing my wife amid a mass of people. This became problematic--when I would try to pick her up from some place where lots of people gather, I would look for her, not find her, and have to circle around to look for her again. As a result of me passing her, she would get upset and irritated--especially if it was cold out.

Nowadays, at an airport, I usually park my car in the lot, rather than circle around looking for my wife amid the throng of people usually found at airports. I get into less arguments that way--and it's worth the four bucks I spent.

I cannot imagine why it would have thought to have anything to do with the visual cortex.

There is a good deal of evidence at present to think that it is due to damage to or a developmental problem with the right fusiform gyrus. It is certainly far more than an issue of not spending enough time looking at and remembering faces.

I believe it is something that makes the face vague--within this visual image, subtle features might not reveal themselves.

There is a notion that this lack of ability to see subtle details is one of the main things that "disinspire" people with autism to socialize. The desire to socialize, according to this theory, is augmented by a delight in the aesthetics of a face.

I almost never forget a face. I usually attatch it to an event, or a place. I am horrible with names. Even names in my phone are like "marty red buell". Or "laura tree stump". And then I can visualize.

I wore a mustache for a long time, and people didn't recognize me when I shaved it. Some people I was around every day didn't realize it until days later. They would look at me and say "there is something different about you", or "you look younger for some reason?" Soo it's not just you.

I fix cars though, and sometimes someone will walk up to me like we are best friends, and try to talk to me, because I did something for them. I don't know who they are. They could come into work, and I still wouldn't recognize them. Kinda like short term memory I think. I do soo much, sometimes I don't know what I did yesterday. If I see the car, and look around it, than I remember what I did.

I will try to elaborate for you. For a long time, it was thought that a particular region of the brain was specialised for recognising faces - and nothing else but faces - and that this was the fusiform gyrus which is a cluster of neurons in the visual cortex. Several studies concluded (erronerously) that "this must be damaged in autism". Subsequent studies showed something very different: that the fusiform gyrus responds to something in the visual field in which the observer has intense interest - bird watching, for example. So how did scientists get their earlier conclusion, in the early 1990s, so wrong?

The answer is twofold: assumption and methodology. What they did was to place children with autism into MRI scanners and show them pictures of faces to test their face discrimination abilities, while monitoring their functional brain responses. They found that in autism, the fusiform gyrus was much less active when compared with NT children for this task. So they jumped to the "obvious" conclusion - which was wrong, and not only wrong, but wrong in two important ways: the fg is not specialised for faces; and the ASD children were uninterested in the faces because the faces of strangers had no interest for them in that context, unlike the NT children. Also, it is possible that many of the ASD kids found being in a very noisy steel tube alarming and were unable to focus much on anything. This variable was not taken into account.

Possibly the ASD kids tried to calm themselves in any way they could - shutting their eyes, staring away from the faces, blanking out - and it was these reactions that caused the fg to show little activity. Like speaking to someone who is wearing noise cancelling headphones, and expecting a reply...

Later and better studies by more insightful neuroscientists used fibre-optic goggles with eye-tracking capacity. Functional MRI (fMRI) was used to measure the response to a face imaged for 3 seconds. The two groups of children were asked to rate the face as emotional or not? To answer this question, the ASD children had to look at the face, and they did, though they did not look at the eyes as much as the NT's (no surprise to us here).

The ASD kids, nevertheless, identified 85% of the faces correctly. The NT's scored 98%. When the ASD children (some) did look into the eyes, they spent 20% less time doing this - and this related to why there was less activity in the fusiform gyrus. It was receiving fewer, or in some cases no, signals! There was nothing functionally and anatomically wrong with the fg, as previously thought (the "broken brain" theory of autism...) Looking as faces was so distressing for some that their amygdala showed increased activity associated with a fear and anxiety response. Only by looking away could these ASD children calm that activity.

There are more recent studies on how important context can be, which (if you really want to know) I will try to locate for you when I get time.