Thinking About Facial Recognition
I think I've mentioned before that I do poorly on facial recognition tests. And what's more, my conscious recognition is way below my actual scores. What they normally do is show two pictures side by side and you have to pick the one you've seen before. I won't consciously recognise either - as far as I'm concerned they're both completely unfamiliar. However, you have to pick a side, and I will pick correctly at a better rate than expected by chance. Similarly with the emotion recognition ones - I'll look at the face and think "this person is happy" and be fairly sure I'm right and then I have to choose one of the four options - angry, scared, hurt, upset (or whatever). Ummm... whoops. How did I think it was the complete opposite? Of course, they all look pretty much the same to me anyway. But I'll pick the correct one above what is expected from chance alone.
So anyway, facial recognition is an interesting thing. There are a few experiences that seem like clues to the way it works, or doesn't for me.
It's extremely variable - sometimes I can see someone in the street for 20 seconds and recognise them days or months later as that person I saw in the street, or see an actor in a movie and then 12 years later immediately recognise them and know which movie I recognise them from. Other times, I can work in the same office (as in, the same room, with 12 people in there total) as two people for a year and still not be able to tell them apart at the end of it.
The people I recognise easily immediately stand out for me. I guess this is obvious. Sometimes it is because they have obvious physical characteristics - a halo of yellow curly hair, or being over 6 foot tall with a long beard and ponytail.
Thereafter, these people are more easily remembered because they are coded in my mind as "angel" and "giant" - although not as these simple words but as charicature-like concepts - a fuzzy halo of yellow light around their head and the concepts of angels and cherubs, and a man who is now over 2m tall with a wild bushy beard and hair and the concept of a giant striding through the mountains. No wonder I find it easier to remember these people.
People with unusual but consistent dress-sense are also easy to remember, and sometimes it'll appear that I'm recognising someone but actually I am recognising their interesting necklace or skirt. A lot of people look non-descript to me - they don't look like anything, except like another human.
The other way I recognise people is that something non-physical stands out immediately - I call this their character. Sometimes I will see someone on the street and their "character" is so... noticeable that I can recognise it when I see it in the future. I would not be able to tell you what they look like however. I tend to find that people's physical appearance (as I percieve it) and their "character" generally match up somewhat though.
Another thing is a kind of combination of these, in that I percieve some aspect of them as their appearance, even if they don't really look like that. But that's how I see them. For example, one of the people at my husband's work is, to me, "the grey man". He is all grey, in my mind. If I imagine him, his skin is grey, his clothes are shades of grey. This is not a bad thing, it looks nice, and I don't mean that I think he is boring or whatever some people might associate with grey. However, in real life, I guess maybe his hair is grey, or somewhat grey? But I recognise him because he matches up with the concept contained in "the grey man" in my mind.
Perhaps it is also obvious that I am much more likely to become friends with the people I actually recognise - but I wonder if it is because I recognise them so easily that I like them and maybe become friends; or is the part of them (their "character") that I recognise the very same part that makes them potential friends. You might be thinking that it is the former, because yellow curly hair and tall with a great beard are very recognisable traits, but I've seen lots of tall people and people with great hair and still not recognised them later.
So, we have established that I store and recognise everyone as these ideas and caricatures.
I had a frightening experience outside a shop a while ago when someone came up to me and started talking to me loudly and excitedly as if she knew me. I could not recognise her for the life of me. She obviously knew me. I examined her face, and I could not find anything to recognise; I was looking at her and just seeing all these PARTS - I saw only the shape of her nose, the colour of her eyes, her eyebrows, mouth, even the pores of her skin but no clue of who she might actually be. Just as I was starting to panic at being confronted by this face of parts, she suddenly turned into who she was, and I stopped seeing the nose and eyes and mouth and skin and simply saw her, and all I knew of her, and her character, and I recognised who she was.
That probably makes no sense to anyone who doesn't already know what I'm talking about. I'm not sure which is the way you'd normally see a person.
Let's run through it again - normally I see a person, I recognise an idea of a person, I usually don't even look at a person's face to recognise them. But sometimes, this fails, and I see a face. I see facial features, and all the things you should remember about an attacker so the police can draw one of those "wanted" pictures of the suspect. This doesn't happen very often, so when it does, it totally freaks me out. Most people look like non-descript blank faces until I get to know them enough that they start to develop a "character", at which point I can more easily recognise them. However, unless they also have strong non-face features like distinctive hair or clothes, I can still be unsure it is them until they start acting like themselves - talking, doing something - rather than walking down the street in deep thought, with their "character" inside them. Some people, however, seem to leak enough character anyway that I can recognise them without even knowing them. A sub-group is people who look like other people with lots of character- e.g. if someone looks like a particular character from a movie, I might recognise them that way - this is a bit like "the grey man" though - they'll look exactly like this movie character to me even though no one else knows what I'm talking about.
When I see a person, I usually don't see what they look like, I see something else. I see the idea of them that I have in my mind. This is probably why the more I like a person the nicer I think they look, and the less I like them the more ugly I think they look. Because I am seeing what I think of them rather than their physical attributes.
Another horrible experience was the time my husband got banged in the lip or something, and he wanted me to look at it. So I had to look past "him" and push through it to see what his lip looked like now. And then, I got stuck half in "seeing the parts" mode and he didn't look like him any more, he looked like this weird face and it totally freaked me out, not being able to recognise him properly and having him look like one of those strangers I don't know rather than the him I know and love.
So anyway, facial recognition is an interesting thing. There are a few experiences that seem like clues to the way it works, or doesn't for me.
It's extremely variable - sometimes I can see someone in the street for 20 seconds and recognise them days or months later as that person I saw in the street, or see an actor in a movie and then 12 years later immediately recognise them and know which movie I recognise them from. Other times, I can work in the same office (as in, the same room, with 12 people in there total) as two people for a year and still not be able to tell them apart at the end of it.
The people I recognise easily immediately stand out for me. I guess this is obvious. Sometimes it is because they have obvious physical characteristics - a halo of yellow curly hair, or being over 6 foot tall with a long beard and ponytail.
Thereafter, these people are more easily remembered because they are coded in my mind as "angel" and "giant" - although not as these simple words but as charicature-like concepts - a fuzzy halo of yellow light around their head and the concepts of angels and cherubs, and a man who is now over 2m tall with a wild bushy beard and hair and the concept of a giant striding through the mountains. No wonder I find it easier to remember these people.
People with unusual but consistent dress-sense are also easy to remember, and sometimes it'll appear that I'm recognising someone but actually I am recognising their interesting necklace or skirt. A lot of people look non-descript to me - they don't look like anything, except like another human.
The other way I recognise people is that something non-physical stands out immediately - I call this their character. Sometimes I will see someone on the street and their "character" is so... noticeable that I can recognise it when I see it in the future. I would not be able to tell you what they look like however. I tend to find that people's physical appearance (as I percieve it) and their "character" generally match up somewhat though.
Another thing is a kind of combination of these, in that I percieve some aspect of them as their appearance, even if they don't really look like that. But that's how I see them. For example, one of the people at my husband's work is, to me, "the grey man". He is all grey, in my mind. If I imagine him, his skin is grey, his clothes are shades of grey. This is not a bad thing, it looks nice, and I don't mean that I think he is boring or whatever some people might associate with grey. However, in real life, I guess maybe his hair is grey, or somewhat grey? But I recognise him because he matches up with the concept contained in "the grey man" in my mind.
Perhaps it is also obvious that I am much more likely to become friends with the people I actually recognise - but I wonder if it is because I recognise them so easily that I like them and maybe become friends; or is the part of them (their "character") that I recognise the very same part that makes them potential friends. You might be thinking that it is the former, because yellow curly hair and tall with a great beard are very recognisable traits, but I've seen lots of tall people and people with great hair and still not recognised them later.
So, we have established that I store and recognise everyone as these ideas and caricatures.
I had a frightening experience outside a shop a while ago when someone came up to me and started talking to me loudly and excitedly as if she knew me. I could not recognise her for the life of me. She obviously knew me. I examined her face, and I could not find anything to recognise; I was looking at her and just seeing all these PARTS - I saw only the shape of her nose, the colour of her eyes, her eyebrows, mouth, even the pores of her skin but no clue of who she might actually be. Just as I was starting to panic at being confronted by this face of parts, she suddenly turned into who she was, and I stopped seeing the nose and eyes and mouth and skin and simply saw her, and all I knew of her, and her character, and I recognised who she was.
That probably makes no sense to anyone who doesn't already know what I'm talking about. I'm not sure which is the way you'd normally see a person.
Let's run through it again - normally I see a person, I recognise an idea of a person, I usually don't even look at a person's face to recognise them. But sometimes, this fails, and I see a face. I see facial features, and all the things you should remember about an attacker so the police can draw one of those "wanted" pictures of the suspect. This doesn't happen very often, so when it does, it totally freaks me out. Most people look like non-descript blank faces until I get to know them enough that they start to develop a "character", at which point I can more easily recognise them. However, unless they also have strong non-face features like distinctive hair or clothes, I can still be unsure it is them until they start acting like themselves - talking, doing something - rather than walking down the street in deep thought, with their "character" inside them. Some people, however, seem to leak enough character anyway that I can recognise them without even knowing them. A sub-group is people who look like other people with lots of character- e.g. if someone looks like a particular character from a movie, I might recognise them that way - this is a bit like "the grey man" though - they'll look exactly like this movie character to me even though no one else knows what I'm talking about.
When I see a person, I usually don't see what they look like, I see something else. I see the idea of them that I have in my mind. This is probably why the more I like a person the nicer I think they look, and the less I like them the more ugly I think they look. Because I am seeing what I think of them rather than their physical attributes.
Another horrible experience was the time my husband got banged in the lip or something, and he wanted me to look at it. So I had to look past "him" and push through it to see what his lip looked like now. And then, I got stuck half in "seeing the parts" mode and he didn't look like him any more, he looked like this weird face and it totally freaked me out, not being able to recognise him properly and having him look like one of those strangers I don't know rather than the him I know and love.
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