203: Re-Entry Is a Doozy

[thefourthvine]

Best Beloved recently pointed out to me that it had been approximately seventeen years since I had recommended anything, which had of course triggered the inevitable thing where I am reluctant to write up a recommendations post because it's been so long since I've done one. You all know how this goes. She suggested I ease myself into it with vids.

Comments

[thefourthvine]

This should be your new journal name, just sayin'.

You might be right about that.

Is it all line drawings? Or fanart specifically? Not I want to do SCIENCE on you!

It's - it's hard to explain. It's a style of drawing, and I struggle with it as much in non-fanart as in fanart. It's worst in very detailed, very busy, very line-filled drawings, and worst of all if it's all lines in one color. (So, like, charcoal, sepia, pencil, etc.) I'm just lost; the artist is apparently relying on her audience having an ability I don't have, something that helps people make sense of that kind of jumble.

So what happens is that I'll see part of it, and I'll assume the rest is decoration or whatever, and then I'll discover that the part I was seeing was the background. The foreground is, in these cases, always occupied by people. Who I can only see after BB traces the lines that make them up. (I ask her, "How was I supposed to know those were the important lines? How did you know?" but she can't explain; whatever is going on is as natural for her as it is unnatural for me.) And then sometimes I'll glance away, and when I look back, I can't find the right lines again - I'm back to being lost.

But I am okay with seeing almost all art, even if it doesn't resonate for me. (Art that has incredibly detailed faces, and the body and background are kind of - faded out, undetailed? There are portraits like this - that kind of art doesn't work very well for me, but I know what it's supposed to be.)

And, thinking of it, I am actually better with fanart than with a lot of art, because there's a shorthand and I know it. If the character has sproingy hair and it's labeled SGA, I know who he is! If it's a Trek piece, blue shirt and pointy ears means Spock! And so on.

(As an example of art that does not give me trouble: my icon. I know it's a face, and I can see it. The face is not why I have the icon, but still: I know there is a person there.)

[mecurtin]

*steeples fingers* Fascinating.

It sounds as though you have a low-quality Face Recognition Module, and it breaks down (almost) completely under unnatural conditions (e.g. line drawings).

What's scientifically interesting is that you *do* see the tiger. (what picture is this? Is it online?)

My hypothesis is that the normal human Face Recognition Module is so advanced that it doesn't need many pixels of input to get a result. You may be evaluating faces as though they are normal patterns.

So if the picture has 100K of data that are part of the tiger, and 20K that are faces, you find the tiger 5 times easier to discern than the faces. The standard human FRM is perhaps 10 times better than that for normal patterns, so to neurotypical person looking at the picture sees the faces twice as well (parses the pattern twice as easily) as the tiger.

... now I want to make your blood relatives look at pictures, too. I get more Agatha Heterodyne-y by the day.

[paxluvfelicitas]

Well, yeah. thefourthvine has talked a lot about having difficulty watching television because of an inability to tell the people in the shows apart after they've changed clothes. Anecdotally, that definitely suggests some degree of prosopagnosia. Since major brain damage to the fusiform gyrus in childhood is the kind of thing that can come up in a blog, I'm assuming it's either associated with some other learning disorder or she's one of the ~2% of the pop that won the genetic lottery there.

(Hi TFV! I promise I'm not trying to be creepy; I find your brain interesting both for the witty writing AND the unusual neurological function! But, you know, if you care to tell me whether you find it unusually difficult to guess ages, or whether any of these photos seem strange, you'd make my day!)

[mecurtin]

Are you a neuroscientist? I would follow you, knew I but where.

Do prosopagnosiacs find faces *harder* to recognize than comparable non-face patterns? That is, is the lack something in pattern-recognition generally, or is their baseline pattern-rec normal?

[paxluvfelicitas]

Nononono, just an interested Bio student who's read a couple of review articles. I am by no means an expert.

From what I've read, prosopagnosia is kinda like autism in that it covers a whole spectrum of different conditions with similar symptoms. In apperceptive prosopagnosia, people can't construct facial components into a sensible whole; they sometimes also have problems with greater pattern recognition. In associative prosopagnosia, people can perceive faces, but have difficulty tying those faces to memory data that lets them know who that person is. So, the highly scientific answer is, "It depends."

[insane_duckfish]

AAAH AAAH AAAH The one in the bottom right corner is CREEPY. It took me a moment to figure out where the change was - my initial reaction was just asldfkjalskdfj WRONG.