Comment by bloak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bloak | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think the first test is very good. I gave it to someone who I know is good at recognising people in real life, but who is not American, has no interest in celebrities, and also never watches films, and they scored badly (3, 20% centile). The second (Australian) test seems better, but, interestingly, the person just referred to didn't do very well in it. I wonder if recognising static images of faces is a significantly different task from recognising people in real life, or even from silent video, when you can see the face in action, as it were.

(There's the bizarre phenomenon, which people other than me have reported, how some people seem to consistently resemble photos of themselves, while others don't so much: they're almost a different person in photos. I think this phenomenon may also have to do with the face in action, but I'm just speculating wildly.)

People with prosopagnosia tend to develop compensation strategies that rely on attributes other than face. Hairstyle, body proportions, style of dress, posture, gait, mannerisms, voice, etc.. Under favorable conditions they (we? I scored 2) can be very good at recognizing people. That's why the test removes everything other than the face itself.

> There's the bizarre phenomenon, which people other than me have reported, how some people seem to consistently resemble photos of themselves, while others don't so much: they're almost a different person in photos.

I'm also just speculating wildly, but this might have something to do with (monoscopic) photography removing depth cues, which is also a factor in the phenomenon of "the camera adds ten pounds". Different lighting and some approaches to makeup and clothing can exaggerate or diminish this effect.

As someone with prosopagnosia, I definitely rely on cues like hair. (It works until someone gets a haircut or changes their facial hair.)

There used to be a great face blindness test online where it first showed you a bunch of full pictures of heads to memorize, then for the quiz it showed cutouts of just the face. I had no idea that I was relying on all these non-face features until they were dramatically removed for that test. (Which I bombed.)

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