This is the situation: when I say “Kim looks like Sue”, I mean that Kim shares facial features with Sue such that they resemble each other.
When my sister says “Kim looks like Sue”, she means that they have similar hair styles and wear similar styles of clothes. It has nothing whatsoever to do with facial features. She’ll tell me that two people look like each other, and when I get a chance to see those two people together, I make it a point to compare their faces and usually they don’t have a single feature in common, nor are their overall faces similar.
Therefore we often have arguements over “who looks like who”.
This strikes me as much more than a simple disagreement; it’s like a fundamental difference in thought processes or brain structure or something. I want to know if there’s some psychological explanation for our differences.
It’s not a fundamental difference in brain structures or thought processes. Just a different set of criteria. You seem to use a different set of attributes as the basis for “appearance templates” than your sister. In your scheme, comparision between appearances is more strongly dependent on those attributes.
Thanks, MikeS, for that link. I’ll have to do some thinking about that, since that column as well as the original column that It referenced had to do somewhat with race. The disagreements that my sister and I have, generally have to do with members of our own (white) race. Perhaps there’s a male/female thing going on? It still blows me away that she doesn’t include facial features in her definition of what someone “lools like”.
yes, I know that things like style of dress and hair are as visual as facial features.
But in my experience, people (male or female) who look at hair and clothes rather than face are often the ones unable to read a map, who like to talk a lot and learn mostly by hearing - the same ones who always insist on phoning you, rather than using email or somesuch. Can she read a map? Can you?
Yes, I am very visual, and am The King of maps and navigation! I have also worked as an artist, draftsman, architect, and machine designer. I don’t know how my sister is with maps, but she’s a pretty good decorator and one of her hobbies used to be sketching house plans. I wouldn’t consider her an artist, though.
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She may be one of those non-visual people…
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Or she could be to some degree face-blind, which is quite different from not being a “visual person”. I am reasonably skilled at reading maps and engineering drawings, and am quite strongly face-blind. This makes me very dependent on features like hairstyle, facial hair and so on, as well as contextual clues. It seems to me that facial recognition is a quite distinct faculty from other aspects of visual perception.