I really wish you could be like the girl in your picture

[blk]

The other evening after climbing I stopped in the grocery store on the way home for a few things, and while in the bread aisle, a couple stopped me to say hi. They recognized me a) from the gym where we all climbed, and b) from my picture on my braiding website, which they had just been browsing recently

Comments

[nathanw]

Have you tried the "Learning Unfamiliar Faces" test at http://www.testmybrain.org/? It's interesting for calibration. I did absolutely terribly at it, and even found the test process kind of painful.

[nathanw]

But generally people recognize me more often than I do them, and even within the group of people I do recognize, I often have a hard time remembering where I know them from or what their name is.

[blk]

I have taken very similar tests, but I think they've generally used real faces in them, which are much easier to distinguish using tiny differences in features. The computer generated ones looked nearly identical to me, when only given a few seconds to look at them. Unsurprisingly, I scored pretty low. :)

(43, higher than 10% of other test takers)

[blk]

My rule of thumb (for myself) is that I need at least 5 minutes of individual, personal, meaningful interaction/conversation with someone before I will remember that we've interacted before or recognize them anywhere. Some people take less, some more, but that seems to be about my experience. So at a party or a con, I'll "meet and forget" easily dozens of people! At least I've gotten used to it. :) .

[blk]

Yeah, I theorize that facial recognition, like almost all other talents, is part innate ability and part practice. Thus many of my friends who are socially-disadvantaged/geeky/neuroatypical to some degree have grown up doing less "looking at" the faces of people, and so are less practiced at recognizing faces, and are thus worse at it.

[plymouth]

I consider myself to be excellent at recognizing faces & don't have to use any tricks to do it - it just happens as a consequence of how my brain processed information. Though there have been occasional instances of people recognizing me and me not recognizing then, it's much more common for me to say "I know I know you but I can't remember where from" than to just plain not recognize them at all.

And of course there's the story of how I met my spouse - he came up to introduce himself to me at Death Guild and I replied "I know who you are - you're auros". Because I recognized him from his LJ icon that had shown up in 3 or 4 friends' comments.

[platypuslord]

I was browsing the braids pictures and -- OMG THAT'S ME! THAT'S MY NECK!!

Perhaps it is a silly thing to get excited over. ^_^;

[blk]

Nearly every year at Arisia I have people coming up to my display books and flip through them, playing the "how many people can you recognize from the back of their head." So nah, not silly. :)

Interestingly, because hair is something I key off of, I can name or identify (or at minimum, would recognize again) probably 95% of the people in my braiding pictures, even if the 10 minutes to do that braid is the only contact I've had with them.

[gwillen]

I ... don't know if I see me?

I think I see Deanna Rubin though maybe?

[blk]

I can recognize celebs in other photos of them. Then I see the same celeb at some event or something in a non-posed, non-glamour photo and I often won't recognize them at all. Sometimes it's the photoshop, and sometimes it's just that they just carry themselves differently.

I'm a little embarrassed that I'm pretty sure I "met" you several times before actually getting to know you and remembering who you were. Yours was actually one of the people where I studied your pictures/userpics for several minutes before being able to conclude that yes, this was the same person I was thinking of from the wedding weekend.

[xuth]

I can recognize objects extremely well (finding a random small piece of plastic on the ground, I can likely place what it came off of for instance) but I don't recognize biological things beyond the level of flower, tree, cat, human...