I have always said that I am terrible at facial recognition. Not full-blown prosopagnosia, but low down on the spectrum of recognition where I have trouble recognizing people out of context (such as when meeting a patient in the grocery store, or recognizing people I have met once before at social functions).
However, I was reading an article in the New Yorker about super-recognizers, people who are exceptionally good at facial recognition, and how the British police use them to identify criminals from closed circuit tapes, and they mentioned how they tested them using the Cambridge Facial Recognition test, so I decided to try it. (Examples here and here).
Anyway, it turns out that I consistently score slightly higher than average, about the 70th percentile (although I was just average on car recognition). This leaves the question of why I am so bad at recognizing people and at attaching faces to names, but at least the brain processing machinery appears to be functioning.
“When you meet a new person introduce yourself. When they introduce themselves in response say their name: Pleased to meet you, so- and- so! Then tell yourself a little story in your mind using their name as many times as possible. Oh, this is so- and- so, he likes to play mini golf. After so- and- so plays a round so- and- so goes on the bumper boats and then so-and- so rides the go karts. Then so- and- so gets a cotton candy and so- and- so goes home.”
I gave it a try and it worked a little… every new person I met for the next several months is “That’s…ah… that’s the guy with the golf… and boats and karts and cotton candy.”
I’m too good at faces, to the point of remembering someone I once saw on the bus wearing an interesting backpack. The attaching names to faces mechanism is a different one.
Hey, I got 47%. I guess that means I might mistake you for me and vice versa!
If my wife of 25 years appeared somewhere in public without context, such as on a train platform among other commuters, I wouldn’t recognize her (I might say “that woman looks like my wife” but wouldn’t be able to say it was for certain).
To be honest, I gave up half way through the second set of faces, because it was obvious that I was completely guessing. So I just guessed the rest of the way through. I’ve always known I’m pretty bad at face recognition.
51% Those last group were totally unguessable. When I did the Bart Simpson pre-test, I thought, “I’ve got this licked!”. Unfortunately the test wasn’t on iconic cartoon characters.
I thought I did well with the first round of tests, but things quickly took a dive when I had to identify the faces after memorizing them for twenty seconds. A lot of my correct answers were lucky guesses.
I got 30%. It quickly turned into frustrated random clicking for me.
Faces for me are extremely contextual. I have bumped into people from work that I sit next to and work with daily, and failed to know who they were in a supermarket or coffee shop setting. Similarly, teammates from my soccer team that I’ve played with for years, bumped into out of soccer context and not recognized them.
I got 75%, which I’m actually kind of surprised by. It got very hard towards the end, though. I suppose I can at least recognize that I’ve seen the face before, but if you showed me a picture of the guy who delivered my pizza last night and the clerk at the convenience store this morning and asked me which was which, I would probably be wrong every time.
This is a universal experience among dog people. You just get used to saying “Hi Spot’s owner! how are you?” who then replies “I’m great, Fido’s owner, how are you?” After awhile it seems almost normal, especially if you’re at a dog competition of some kind and EVERYONE is having conversations like that. I was at a dog event last night and can list the name of every single dog present and the name of only one person that was present, despite the fact I know all the people quite well.
72%, I thought my score would be lower. Seeing someone out of context of where I associate them to be I seldom recognize them.
In my family it is a running joke on me about driving to and from the house. I can drive right past my wife and or kids on the other side of the road in one of our cars and not see them.
62% but I got that entirely based on the eyebrows. All the “correct” answers had distinctive, easily memorizable eyebrows. Once they took those away I was lost.