Aspies For Freedom

It is generally said that many aspies have face blindness. Let me first tell you that I don't know much about face blindness but many NT's have more face blindness than me. For example a NT friend tells me about a movie he just watched. And he says the same actress plays also in another movie(he tells me the name). I tell him that they are not the same person and they don't even have any resemblance. He insists. We check it on the internet. Of course I turn out to be right and he still says they look a lot like each other. This is not just 1 incident. When it comes to movies etc NT's seem to be a lot more face blinded than me. Sometimes we Aspies don't recognize someone when we see him but that's not because we're face blind, it's because we don't care. That's true for me at least. For example a few years ago in a chess tournament I played with some guy from another city a game which lasted about 3-4 hours. I didn't look at his face once. Maybe I looked but I didn't pay attention. Half an hour after the game some guy came to me and started talking about the game. I thought he was just an observer but it turned out he was my opponent. In this case I didn't remember him because I don't care, but when I care I can remember every point in his face. It seems to me that when my friends don't remember the people in movies when they see them in another movie or confuse them with other actors, that's the best they can do but when we don't remember someone's face, that's actually because we don't really care about most people's faces in real life.

I think the term "face-blindness" refers to the inability to detect a person's mood by the appearance of their face, rather than distinguishing between two different people. I'm pretty bad at both, though.

I think I have mild prosopagnosia.  I particularly have a problem recognising adult men of a certain type.  

It's easier to distinguish women, because they have different hair lengths, hair styles, hair colours, accessories and so on.  Men, however, well, if they're an average/tall white bloke with short brown-ish hair in their 20s-30s, well, that includes a lot of men, and I confuse them.

Perhaps it's also related to a problem reading facial expressions as well?

Face blindness or prosopagnosia.  I have it, diagnosed when I got my Asperger's diagnosis.

I don't often recognize people's faces if I don't know them well or they might be in some place that I have not seen them before.  I am getting better at recognizing actors' faces but sometimes I need help in watching a film because most white blonde women look all the same to me.   I usually recognize my family but not if they change their hair and I have not seen them for a period of 6 months or longer.  

I read somewhere that about 30% of people with Asperger's also have face blindness.  There are some with face blindness that don't have autism too.  

Most NT's just react with anger when I say that I don't remember them.  More people have heard about autism than face blindness but that does not seem to diminish their scorn for it.

Not at all i can remember people from years ago and  i have no problems with faces.

Yeah I agree, I have that problem, a lot of me recognizing faces is context-dependant. I can see someone at one place and have no clue who they are at another, it's been like that most of my life, just like putting names to faces, I'm poor at that too.

I've have a moderate degree of it but strangely I can recognize famous people I see on TV even at different ages.  If I've only met someone briefly or I haven't seen them for all long time then I probably wouldn't recognize them.  I've had many experiences where someone would address me by name and start talking to me and I would be at a complete loss as to who this person is.

Yup.

I often walk past people I know without noticing them, but that's either because I'm not paying attention or because I'm intimidated by the big crowd they're in (like in school).

I don't think I have face blindness.

I'm face-blind. I recognize family, housemates, and one to five close friends; but anyone more than that, and I'm clueless. People as familiar as the President and the characters on a TV show I've seen an entire season of (I still can't tell apart the people on ER) are often impossible to tell apart... I often use clothing, voices, body shape, and other cues to tell people apart, rather than depending on faces. Hair is a big clue; but a character who changes his/her hair often may end up being unrecognizable to me, though. It's hardest for me to recognize "pretty" people--those with regular faces. People with features that aren't regular are easier; though that doesn't necessarily mean that they're considered "ugly"--they could be just "distinctive" or "exotic".

The most annoying part of it is that not only could i walk past, say, a former roommate or a friend from high school and completely fail to recognize them... but that I might have a deep, interesting conversation with someone, forget what they look like, and be completely blindsided when they greet me warmly the next day. I remember them--I just don't remember their faces! One of my most embarassing face-blind moments: I've worked at a church for four months, and I suddenly discover, upon seeing them in the same room, that there are FOUR secretaries, not one: I've been treating them all as the same person!

Ok, here I am very different. I can remember very well a face. I have more trouble remembering names. Sometimes I see a face and know that I have seen it before, but can't recall where I saw it.

Autistics typically struggle with face recognition more than NTs.  NTs use one part of their brains when recognizing objects and use a different, separate part of their brains when recognizing faces.  Autistics, however, use the object recognition part of their brain when recognizing both objects and faces.  Since the brains of those on the spectrum don't distinguish between faces and everything else, autistics tend to take less notice of faces and pay less attention to them than NTs do.  In addition to less readily observing faces to begin with, autistics most likely have to put in more "effort" to capture the distinguishing features of an individual's face because don't have specialized programming like NTs for facial recognition.  This, however, doesn't mean that every autistic is face blind.  I can balance the books for a company using generic spreadsheet software and I can also balance the books using a program that was specifically designed for tracking revenues and expenses.  While the bookkeeping-specific software would make getting the job done easier, the generic spreadsheet software still can get the job done.  So while autistics didn't "receive" any programming to specifically recognize faces, they were programmed for recognizing things and that still makes it possible to get the job done.  In addition, a lot of research shows that many aspies/HFAs are able to compensate for the weaker facial recognition by using their heightened senses to recognize an individual (e.g., recognizing the person not by his face but by his voice or by his scent).  I think the key difference is that NTs instinctively observe and catalog everyone we come into contact with for future reference.  We cannot help but recognize everyone after we've met them once, even if we can't remember where we recognize them from.  Many on the spectrum can "choose" whether they want to participate in the process or not -- their mind doesn't always instinctively and automatically catalog people.

-Certainly there are Aspies who are not face-blind at all, and NT's who are very much face-blind.

My boyfriend is a college professor, and he has a seating chrat on his desk with name and photograph of every student on the chart, showing where they sit in the classroom.  He says when someone radically changes their hair or starts/stops wearing glasses it caan be very confusing.

He has similar problems with movies -- confusing two characters or not recognizing an actor from one scene to the next. We joke that every movie is like "Mulholland Drive" to him...

There are different degrees of face-blindness. Some people are so face-blind that they can't recognize family members; others just have minor problems with recognizing people they've met a couple of times.