Question about facial recognition and seeing patterns

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From what I have researched, it is difficult for some Aspies to notice facial features. This is what I have read as "flat face" or "blank face" syndrome or something like that. Where one cannot recognize facial features, but mostly memorizes hairlines or something else about a person. However, I find that I have the ability to remember people on TV. Like I am watching a show, and there is a guest star on there that I know from somewhere. And I am usually good at remembering what else they have been on.

One time while watching Aliens I was able to discern that an actor in the movie is BROTHER to an actor I have watched on Psi Factor based on certain facial features and voice. This actor is William Hope, brother of Psi Factor actor Barclay Hope.

This is something I find myself doing a lot, and can name what other movies or things an actor has done. And yet in real life, I find it hard to remember the facial features of people I meet, sometimes briefly, and have to constantly see them again and again and again before I can remember them or even their name. And even then, I can't remember their names, because I have an inability to match names with faces.

Why is this?

2D versus 3D?

If I think of my children at a certain age I remember the photos we took, I don't have image memories of them.

I am not sure what you mean by 2D versus 3D. Please elaborate, so I can answer your question.

a picture/movie is on 2 dimensions, a face in reality you see in 3 dimensions
I think this is the difference. I recently thought of the same problem with memories from photos and not from reality.

Oh okay. Yes I seem to have a 3D problem actually. 2D with TV shows I remember better. Is it harder for someone to remember in 3D? Is that what you mean? Or 2D actually...

Face from movies and television I remember very well, because they're entertaining me. Faces I see every day, no problem. But if someone I worked with two years ago and haven't seen since walks up to me out shopping - I recognize that I know the face, but totally blank on where I know them from.

I don't think that's a facial recognition problem, more of a sudden social data input processing problem. A kind of panic attack at having to make conversation with someone I no longer feel equipped to socialize with, causing my mind to overload, leading to a memory shutdown.

Problem with that theory is, their name or where I knew them from should come back to me later and it rarely does. People must think I'm a horribly rude SOB when they make eye contact and I never speak to them. But what do you say to someone whose face seems very familiar, but you can't recall a single damn thing about them?

I have a hard time remembering faces of people that i don't see very often unless they have some kind of really unique feature about them. I think it's at least partially because i don't make eye contact well or look at other peoples' faces when i'm talking to them as much as other people do. With actors on tv i remember them really easily if i've seen them a few times. But, say, if i'm watching a movie and someone is only a minor character and not an actor that i recognize, then i'll often get confused about that character because i won't recognize them from scene to scene... I'll end up asking other people "uhhh, which one was he?" and they'll say "the one who (insert action here)." Makes it hard to get the subtle things in movies sometimes. I don't know if i explained that very well, but, yeah. After i've seen someone enough i get a really good mental picture of them in my mind, though. And i have a problem with names, too. I have to bround a person a lot before i'll remember their name. A lot of the time it just won't occur to me that i should remember someone's name. I know the names of the other workers in my depaartment at work and the important managers... But there are some people at work from other departments, who i've been working around for over a year and a half now and see pretty regularly, whose names i don't remember. A lot of the time when someone else asks me about someone, i'll end up describing them, pointing to them, or saying "the girl who works in _________" because i don't remember their name.

Oh! Yes! I'm very poor at remembering faces in real life - I usually have to 'meet' them at least half a dozen times before I begin to recognize them on sight (and even then, if I see them out of context, somewhere I didn't expect to see them, I can still be thrown) - but I'm very good at recognizing faces on TV.

I always felt that it was a combination of two things in my case:

a) TV not being a two-way interaction; not having to reciprocate and therefore have more brain power free to concentrate on taking in the visual details.

b) Simply not being interested enough in people in real life. I assume that NT people, for whom social interaction is very, very important, are automatically interested to some degree when presented with another person and immediately - even though they may not even realize they are doing it - begin examining them, their appearance, perhaps their hairstyle, the way they are dressed, deciding what kind of person they are from the visual cues, etc. That interest is rarely present for me. Even as I'm speaking to someone, I can FEEL that, no matter how hard I try, they aren't registering deeply enough in my brain and that I'm not going to remember them.

Here's how I think about it. NTs have a blazingly fast and adaptive social processing center hard-wired to the senses. Aspies need to re-encrypt the information, off-load to the 'pattern' part of the brain, apply static algorithms, re-encrypt it again, and send it back to the output side of the social processing center.

The TV isn't social, so everyone uses the 'pattern' area to process it. Also, you're supposed to stare at the TV, so the information gets burned in better. In public, people call the cops if you do that <grin>. And in social situations we have to devote the limited bandwidth to more important things than peoples' exact features.

Do you talk back to the TV? I used to do that all the time, but it freaked people out. I think it's because of this same processing difference.

They teach police officers to notice and catalog certain specific facial features individually, instead of relying just on the complete face. There are the automated face-sketching tools, where you pick an ear, pick a nose (no - I didn't mean that as a pun!), etc. It's amazing how close you can get with 5 choices on 5 features, for example. I have not tried applying this systematically, but I probably should. Has anyone else experimented with it?