Prosopagnosia: how many of you have it?

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I do not know what to call it, i have trouble recognizing famous people on tv/movies. (Everyone almost in Hollywood looks the same to me)
Also sometimes people i know it doesn't register that i know them right away.
My gf thinks it because i don't pay attention to their faces, which is likely very correct.
My doctor tested me once and i did great on the visual/spatial memory stuff, yet since i don't stare or look at people really my gf thinks thats why i don't always recognize them.
Also some people here look alike so its gets confusing. I've figured it out though

I have this problem. It was years before I even realized that most people recognize others by their faces. That just seemed so alien and impossible to me that when I heard people talk about recognizing faces, I assumed that the "face" was not meant literally, but rather as a synecdoche for a person's whole appearance. Only recently did I learn that no, in fact, most people do recognize others by their facial features. Weird.
Voice is a big clue for me, as is hair. When people get haircuts radically different from their previous style or dye their hair, I get very confused and sometimes don't recognize them. I often can't place people out of context. I do much better with people I see on a regular basis than with people I see only occasionally.
Beyond hair, voice, and context, I use whatever other clues or details I can. If someone wears glasses or has a recognizable style, I'll often remember that. I can't usually make eye contact with people, but I do tend to notice their eye color, and that's helpful sometimes. Pieces of jewelry or other accessories can help as well, if someone wears the same thing all the time.
Beyond that, I always remember names. So often I hear people state that they can remember faces, but not names. I am the exact opposite. Sometimes, I'll see someone I don't recognize who seems to know me, and then the person will be addressed (by someone else) by name, and I'll know who they are. This happens a lot with my wife's friends.

Count me in. I can't recognise people out of their usual setting at all.

I definitely struggle with that. Lately I seem to have gotten better with it, but I'm not sure why. My skills with recognizing people in real life haven't improved.

I often recognize (or misrecognize) people by their size.

There are two local women who are both quite large and have the same color of hair. One is married to the brother or cousin of the other. I can't tell them apart at all unless they are standing there together.

Yes. I have a laughably bad ability to remember visual stuff in general though (not the same as being able to remember content, etc.). I remember names well but not faces.

Is being "face blind" related to not being able to remember where you parked? I tend to think it is.

I wouldn't imagine that it would be related.

It appears that the right fusiform gyrus is the part of the brain that is used to identify faces. The circuity involved is apparently pretty specific to the task. Similar circuity in the left fusiform gyrus appears to be used to associate names with objects and so the circuity there would be similar.

I don't see how remembering where you are parked would be related to being able to identify faces.

I can never remember names rather than faces. Even on a short term basis. For example if i go to one of my regional autism network meetings after half an hour i will have forgotten everyones name. Even after an icebreaker session.

When I was a kid in elementary school I would never remember more than a few kids in my class (of 23 or so). I mean, they sometimes came in wearing different clothing or haircuts so it was too hard to keep track of them! Anyway, at recess we had a large playground and I would look for the very few kids that I knew to see if I missed the cue to go back to class. I would run all over the playground in a panic looking for anyone I recognized. I would reluctantly go up to random kids asking them, "Are you in my class?!" "Are you in my class?!" to their annoyed or alarmed faces. It was extremely embarrassing and probably did not win me any friends.

Also, my relatives sometimes ask me if I remember relatives from years ago. They always remind me who they are, every single time, sometimes even show me photographs, but I simply cannot remember who they are. Saying their names is like showing me a blank piece of paper and having to distinguish it from another blank piece of paper. I cannot "see" the relationships between people without a face or a very in-depth, interesting conversation, or something in particular that makes them stand out significantly in my mind.

As a young child I did get "lost" in a store (Fortunoff's) and the moving crowd overwhelmed me with all the unfamiliar faces. At that point I forgot what my family looked like, thinking that any one of them might or might not be part of my family and I just couldn't tell, so I screamed. Finally, my aunt found me and grabbed my hand. I was relieved until I "lost" them again a few minutes later and began to panic, while they were standing perhaps 10 feet away from me. They thought this was funny; I don't know why.

I am better at recognizing people now, after many exposures to the same person and in the same context. I don't like "memorizing" people's/acquaintances' faces because it feels physically shocking to me, like I'm integrating them into myself by way of memory, and it feels terribly intimate and scary.

In March, while at a supermarket I encountered my mother and niece (we had gone to the store together, but shopped separately), and I did not recognize them until they started talking to me.

Thankfully I recognize my immediate family but that's about where it ends. I thought I saw a Chinese friend of mine at the store but it was someone who apparently didn't look anything like him and when I told him he joked that I was guilty of "all look same" which made me really embarrassed 'cause that wasn't it at all. My husband thinks it's hilarious since I'm always saying he looks "just like" different celebrities who don't look anything remotely similar (the guy who plays Dean Winchester on Supernatural, the guy who plays Ragnar Lothbrok on Vikings, etc). Weirdly enough, I have a hard time recognizing myself in photographs. When people tag me on Facebook (especially in old photos), I almost have to take their word for it.

I recognize my immediate family when I see them at home. However, sometimes with my two nieces who live here I have to check their hair and clothing to see which one is which.

I constantly confuse celebrities too. I watched Lost for the first time recently, and I kept confusing Sayid and Sawyer for Desmond and Desmond for Sayid and/or Sawyer (as in I couldn't figure out if I was seeing Sayid, Sawyer, or Desmond when I saw Desmond), although I never confused Sawyer and Sayid directly for each other.

I also kept getting Shannon and Claire confused when I saw their faces without additional context (Shannon is taller, Claire was pregnant).

Last edited by Verdandi on 28 Apr 2013, 9:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, keeping track of people in movies is definitely difficult. Even in novels, I have a hard time keeping track of the characters in the beginning of the story (especially those long Russian novels that have dozens of characters introduced in a few pages) and it isn't usually until the middle of the story after numerous recheckings that I get their roles straight--once I can remember which one is which! I also have a case of topographical agnosia (place blindness) so that if a story or movie is in a period or place that is unfamiliar I get double or triply lost. I have to use every inch of my faculties to keep everything straight in my head. Relationships between people are also hard for me to keep track of, because I need to develop a mental flowchart to keep track of how one person is related to another, and it is really confusing to me, especially if the branches keep expanding or grow more complex. Most times I just ignore the people and focus on the story, and just hope that the people make themselves memorable enough later on in the story for me to begin remembering who is whom.

One of my nephews has two boys who I can only tell apart if they are standing next to each other -- the taller one is the older son.

He also has a daughter. The other day I was reviewing some pictures taking of an annual hunt including a party the night before. The daughter appeared in several pictures in the series. What I thought was strange was that in some pictures she was wearing a different shirt than in the other pictures. It turned out that they were two different girls -- toward the end of the pictures there was one of the two girls standing together.

On Saturday morning, I saw my younger brother standing in the street in town talking on a cell phone. That didn't make sense because his father in law was in town this weekend and the two were surely running around together.

It turns out that it was someone else completely. To make it more interesting, the guy I saw is twenty years younger than my brother and is of Mexican ancestry while my family is or Norwegian/Scottish/English/who knows what else ancestry.

One time in middle school, these two people looked incredibly similar, and I had a hard time telling them apart - but everyone else said they weren't. Eventually, I just tried to figure out who was who each day, and then associating them with that shirt for the rest of the day (They had very similar hairstyles)

Aside from that, the only thing I know about Propagnosia is from 999.

If 'partial inability to recognize faces' counts as face-blindness, then I suppose I do have it I appear to be able to recognize face-shapes if I specifically look for them and try to remember them, though that largely only works short-term unless there's something very distinctive. (I took a face-blindness test and did pretty well at remembering a generic face a few minutes after seeing it, but flunked the celebrity-recognition section.)

I appear to be able to learn faces eventually, but it takes a long time. Similar faces throw me off easily. I have noticed myself not recognizing people if they change their hair/clothes/etc. enough. Context does appear to have an effect as well, though I'm not sure if I can say I wouldn't recognize my immediate family because I've never been in that sort of situation. There has also actually been a time fairly-recently where I asked 'Which one is [name] again?' the NT replied 'She's the one who [did action] earlier today' and I replied 'You're going to have to be more specific.' (Thankfully my sister thought to explain that I have trouble with faces and asked about what the girl was wearing, which I could keep in mind until I saw the girl I asked about.)

While not as bad as faces, I also have a hard time remembering names. You can guess how much trouble this gives me when it comes to interacting with others.

And then there's not paying much attention to clothing and having trouble estimating measurements. I would so not be helpful in giving a suspect's description if I needed to.

Still, when describing it to most people, I think I'd use the term 'deficient.'

Last edited by Scia on 28 Apr 2013, 10:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.