Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion recognizing people and faces

Like when you don't see them until they snap their fingers in your face? I have always put that down to inattention.

Are you thinking of Prosopagnosia? That's usually really severe and due to brain damage. Other than that, it's just focusing on relevant data in the surroundings AKA spacing out or going on auto-pilot.

Agree, that's probably just being a space case. I'm sure it's a feature of being ADHD-inattentive as well, though. And in my husbands case, it's being severely shortsighted even with contact lenses!

Yes, he has trouble remembering names of everyday objects sometimes; thanks for giving me the name of this problem. But the fact that it didn't occur to him that others would recognize his face makes me think that he doesn't recognize faces very well.

That makes sense! Yes, I was just thinking about the normal inattentiveness. It seems to also coincide with sensory overload -- maybe a learned ability to tune things out to reduce input? I don't think I ever understood inattentiveness before quite how I've been learning about it on this board.

This is not correct, as seen in this thread.

Adding to this old thread... a new report on a study regarding prosopagnosia (face blindness) - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230227132443.htm

I suspect a slow decline affects some of us, just like the cognitive decline of senile dementia. I’ve just attended a thirty year Uni reunion and I had no trouble recognising just about everyone there (about one hundred and ten old classmates from a graduating class of around two hundred), whereas as hard as I try, I frequently have trouble recognising my kids’ teachers and their friends’ parents when they greet me in the shops & streets (out of context). They’ll look familiar, but I just can’t place them or remember their name. These are people I’ve only met in the last decade, so it appears I am not as good at imprinting memory as I once was, but retrieval of old memories seems to be working well, which fits with well known difference between old and new memories. Unfortunately, I’m easier to recognise and my kids are well known in the community, so I often feel terrible and try to make up for it by being very polite.

FWIW, unless one has an exceptional memory for faces (which I do not), this (frequent nodding and smiling) is an occupational hazard for those of us in my profession (as, I suspect, in several others), as meeting me professionally is a much more emotionally significant occurrence for my clients than meeting them is for me. Since I live in the same community where I work, I often run across people I have met once or a handful of times who greet me by name--and I have only the vaguest of impressions who they are ("parent of one of my students" does not narrow it down much). So I'm with you, Eagle Mum--lots of conscious friendliness and vague inquiries after the wellbeing of their families!

The capacity to recognise a person by looking simply at their face or a photograph of their face is known as facial recognition. Extreme variations in lighting, viewing angle, and distance encountered in daily life have no impact on this capacity.The researchers found that human facial recognition abilities vary greatly through a variety of recall and identification tests on volunteers. According to the survey, most people can name between 1,000 and 10,000 acquaintances, family members, coworkers, and celebrities by face . .