I have become increasingly intrigued and amazed at our ability to recognise people. Family, friends, celebrities, can all be instantly recognised even if in a totally unexpected place - miles away or years away from previous sightings.
Since faces have very few ‘landmarks’ then the ability to differentiate even closely similar faces is surely amazing. Can anyone supply any links that go into this or into the chances of accidentally bumping into and recognising someone unexpectedly?
http://www.cs.rug.nl/~peterkr/FACE/face.html is a good place with lots of links, and source code, if you’re into playing with some mechanics yourself.
It is an amazing feat, but actually there are many “landmarks.” And we’ve been designed by many generations of evolution to specifically pick out other human faces.
What do you call an incapacitation of this ability?
(I’ve got that)
Visual agnosia? That doesn’t just apply to faces though.
Mine doesn’t either, unfortunately, it’s just that that’s the most annoying manifestation. With most other things, people don’t expect you to recognize and identify things based purely on what they look like; or, if they do, the appearances are more distinctive to begin with.
I’m in your boat, AHunter3. I have to meet someone several times before I remember them by face. It has sometimes led to unintended insults, regrettably.
The inability to recocognize faces (mostly due to brain damage, I’m not sure wether it is called the same when it occurs spontaneously) is called prosopagnosia. And you right that is almost never solely applies to faces, allthough hard core adherents of modularity like to believe so.
-Martijn
you are right ** it** almost never solely applies to faces
The inability to recognize typos is much more widespread and generally known as “stupitity” (especially when using preview).
oh, and whether…
oh, and whether…
::hangs head in shame, whines “will I ever learn…”::
I have that too…I live in a very small town and everyone knows everyone…it is so frustrating to have someone walk up and start talking to you when you have no idea who they are.
I’ve gotten very good at identifying them based on the conversation and few ever know I cannot recognize them.
While I have no trouble recognizing family members and friends, sometimes I have trouble recognizing people of lesser acquaintance if I meet them outside of the environment I am used to seeing them in (such as work). At work, no problem, but in a store, for example, they may not be wearing the clothes I expect to see them in. Sometimes I will be used to seeing someone with or without a hat on and then when the opposite occurs I’m thrown off track. One time some people my parents know came over to visit while I was there. I had always seen them in their place of business but this time they were at my parent’s house while I was there. For a moment I thought one of them was my aunt and I was about to give her a hug before I realized who she really was (someone I don’t know closely enough where a hug would have been appropriate).
There have been times when I am in a store and someone who recognizes me says hello. It’s embarrassing to stand there and try to remember who it is without looking like an idiot. Other times I will have to look at someone more than once to determine if he or she is someone I know before making the possibly embarrassing mistake of greeting them.
It seems that perhaps I have a mild form of prosopagnosia (unless it’s one of those “binary” conditions, either you have it or you don’t).
trying to get it right in one go…
I don’t think it is an “all or none phenomenon”. I’m only familiar with the brain damage variety, where the amount of damage obviously influences the amount of blindness and mild and severe cases are possible.
But again, there might be other causes, it’s been a while.
My experiences are almost identical to what dwc1970 describes.
Slightly off-topic, but it’s equally amazing how little information is required for our brains to perceive a face. Hence several well-known optical illusions and the infamous Face on Mars fiasco.
I hoped for responses on topic rather than on anti-topic. Anyone know any more? Especially about the ‘meeting people away from home’