Hard News: Have you met thingy?
125 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 2 3 4 5 Newer→ Last
-
@ Stephen Hill (or was that Dave ;-) )
2. The face is unfamiliar (looks like a stranger)
That's me (not the stranger but the bad memory for faces thingy)
Quite often I will recognise a face and rack (sp?) my brain for a name only to discover that I have, in fact, never met them before. Weird eh? -
1. The face is familiar but you can't put a name to it
2. The face is unfamiliar (looks like a stranger)I'm absolutely the 1st. I often go to a pub quiz, and the other week they put up a photo of Rosa Parks and the date of her getting arrested. "Who is this woman?"
As a student of the New Left and the Civil Rights movement, I 100% knew who that was, in the same way I recognised the photo of Bill Ayers that they put on the TV news last night. I could give my quiz partner a dozen facts about her, what she did, when she died etc etc etc.
Do you think I could bring her name out of my brain? Nope.
Same with that famous faces quiz. Apart from Blair, I recognised all the faces. But for Travolta I had to put 'Grease', and for Robin Williams I put in 'Mork!'. Knew who they were, but the names just wouldn't come.
-
Quite often I will recognise a face and rack
I'll forget the face, but I might remember an impressive rack.
-
@Stephen Hill
More random research findings: people's self-ratings of their face recognition abilities have no relationship to their actual performance on lab face recognition tasks.
Does this mean people who think they are good at face-recognition are actually not so good? Or people who think they are crap are actually better than they think they are? Or both?
I realise this thread is getting old but I hope you can answer. Does that test at Face Blindness Testing have any relevance to the true nature of someone's actual ability? (especially the Unknown Faces test)
To assuage my vanity, I'd like to able to infer that my 88% result in that test supported my original premise that I was good at facial recognition... Mebbe not?
-
Well I got 69% which would explain my completely below average face recognition thing - but it doesn't explain the name disability that many of us seem to have.
-
it doesn't explain the name disability that many of us seem to have.
Could I hazard the opinion that it may have something to do with the fact that many of the PAS community are, broadly speaking, social liberals and, ahem, not-so-young any more?
Possibly a case of sustained substance use/abuse coming home to roost?
-
Oh say, what do you guys do when someone you don't know (or don't recognise perhaps) taps you on Facebook?
Oh you accept them (coz you don't want to appear like a complete arse if by chance you do know them), check out their profile, reliase you have no idea who they are and then delete them later - also works for people who you actually 'do' know but wish you didn't. Unless they're friend stalkers they won't even notice.
-
Possibly a case of sustained substance use/abuse coming home to roost?
I can blaim a number of my failings on that... but name and face recognition is not one of them... I have always been crap at it. In fact I suspect I am getting slightly better as I get older.
-
To assuage my vanity, I'd like to able to infer that my 88% result in that test supported my original premise that I was good at facial recognition... Mebbe not?
I got the same score but have always thought I was hopeless at recognition... I'm not sure what to make of that now... probably I am, but not when I'm being tested?
-
Possibly a case of sustained substance use/abuse coming home to roost?
I blame several things in my own case, but not that (strongest thing I've ever taken was No Doz. The times on Wombat Weed I can count on...OK I'd probably get to the second set of toes but only just).
Plain tiredness is a big part of it. Martin Amis comments in one of his essays that everyone over the age of about 32 is just tired all the time. Rang a bell with me.
Allied to this: parenthood. I rang my oldest mate a few months after my daughter was born, we've known each other since before we could talk: his partner answered the phone and I'm having to say 'Is...umm... there?' Total brain freeze.
I'm usually OK with faces: not so much with names. And it bugs the hell out of me because I used to be damn good at this stuff.
Still good on dates. Elections, Wars, Battles, even Wedding Anniversiaries. I think some of thsi comes from being generally historically minded. As a kid I used to always bug my dad and grandpa with questions about when this shed or fence was built on the farm. Often just after a heifer had kicked one of them. Big on historical awareness, less so on social awareness.
Oh, and songs. They tend to stick in the mind like biddybids.
-
Holy crap those tests were interesting.
I somewhat facetiously wrote good at faces and names but crap at putting them together. But on the unknown faces I got 67/72 and on the famous faces 12/30. I knew every one of the famous faces just could not find the name for them.
It almost certainly says something very important about how my brain is wired up - I just have no idea what it is.
Oh and @Stehpen #1 obviously
cheers
Bart -
Allied to this: parenthood. I rang my oldest mate a few months after my daughter was born, we've known each other since before we could talk: his partner answered the phone and I'm having to say 'Is...umm... there?' Total brain freeze.
Yup - first 18 months of my youngest's existance was often, not always, a bit of a fuzzy haze. I figure it's parents that represent most of viewing demographic for mid-evening sit-com re-runs; they were the only things that I was capable of digesting.
-
I'll forget the face, but I might remember an impressive rack.
Fnarr Fnarr
I got 65% on that test and I think I was guessing most of the time, hell, they all looked bald to me. -
Ah. 30/30 for the famous people (with matching names). And 92% for unfamilar bald people (though having Ricky Ponting in there was a gimme).
So while I share the name-loss symptoms described by many above, I'm not actually on the Brown Syndrome Spectrum. I really am just a rude prick...
-
I did the gender/emotion test and was found to be decidedly average. I also suspect that they were all called Steve or Stephen or Stephanie. ;-)
-
I know someone who only goes out with guys called Phil for that very reason.
Ah.
Philphilia
-
Ah.
PhilphiliaYou have fullphiled all my expectations
-
She gets her phil, that's for sure
-
And she's philanthropic to boot.
-
@ Sacha
most research shows that women are better at recognising women's faces than men but no better at recognising men's faces
How does that work? - please say more, StephenI don't think anyone really knows - I certainly haven't seen a convincing explanation in the literature. Some speculate that women pay more attention to women's faces than men's but why that happens (if it does) is unclear. One consequence of this phenomenon is that many tests of face memory only use male faces (like the ones on the face blindness site) ... and they make them bald so as to avoid providing 'hair cues' that can lead to good performance even in the absence of normal face memory (prosopagnosics are famous for using such cues to navigate the world of people ... a la The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat).
-
@ Evan Yates
More random research findings: people's self-ratings of their face recognition abilities have no relationship to their actual performance on lab face recognition tasks.
Does this mean people who think they are good at face-recognition are actually not so good? Or people who think they are crap are actually better than they think they are? Or both?The research I've seen shows that the correlation between people's judgements of their own face recognition ability and their performance on lab tests is nearly 0 (-.05 for those who care). For a correlation to be near 0 'both' is likely to be the answer to your question. That makes good sense to me - a lot of people I meet reckon their memories are awful but do okay on lab tests. On the other hand there are always a bunch of people who think they're flasher than they really are.
I realise this thread is getting old but I hope you can answer. Does that test at Face Blindness Testing have any relevance to the true nature of someone's actual ability? (especially the Unknown Faces test)
The low correlation might occur because lab tests don't tell us about our face recognition performance in 'the real world'. I suspect that this is not the case and that a good score on a face memory test is a reasonable guide to how well we remember faces day-to-day. It is also probably the case that some people ARE good judges of their face memory ability (but most of us aren't).
-
Russell, I am saddened and disappointed that you chose to broach this subject while I'm away - for it is I who wrote the book on making a dick of himself in such situations. Although mostly in New Zealand, mind, perhaps there is such a thing as being a native speaker of connecting names to faces. Or perhaps it's that New Zealanders *always* address one another by name. Show offs.
If/when I become king, my first edict will be to outlaw names with subtle variations. Ann/Anna, Isabel/Isabella, Kirsty/Kristy - we shall have no more of that.
-
He's back! We missed you, Gianni
-
@Stephen Hill
1. The face is familiar but you can't put a name to it
2. The face is unfamiliar (looks like a stranger)
I get both. But I take your point that it might be influenced by the sheer number of things I'm processing a lot of the time.
My two aspie kids seem to have quite different memory configurations.
One has hopeless short-term memory but detailed long-term recall; the other is right in the moment but seems to lack for episodic memory -- it seems to have a big influence on how and what he learns.
-
Jo S,
One prosaic reason why lots of people like Russell forget stuff is because they have lots they have to remember - they often forget about same percentage of material as everyone else but that turns out to be rather a lot in absolute terms.
I just wish I knew why I continue to absorb and recall completely useless and irrelevant trivia, when names just refuse to stick. People ask me "how do you know this stuff?" and I have absolutely no idea. I wonder if there is some sort of preferential retention.
Once was in Burger king while at uni and met a friend of a friend while having dinner with the boyfriend of the time. Remembered the friend of the friend's name but totally blanked on the boyfriend. "Hi Vincent have you met .....?". Luckily the boyfriend found it hilarious. And refused to save me by filling in the gap.
Post your response…
This topic is closed.