Is there a spectrum of some sort for faceblindness? It seems like I catch mild spells of it which have become more prominent as I get older.
Yes, there is.
Anyone interested in to what degree they are faceblind can take an online study! This won’t help identify if you have spells of faceblindness, but it’s definitely on a spectrum.
The average score is 80%; the average score for faceblind people is 51%.
i got 44%
lol
i have so much trouble recognizing people. half of the time when people say hi to me i honestly don’t know who they are.
I got 74% but I would’ve gotten higher… that last test was some serious bullshit
if you get too many right it just becomes a blur of red and green pixels which are pretty much completely indistinguishable, there are no identifiable traits of the faces, maybe if you, like, memorized the exact edge of the face – but no, they change that too… at the end there’s pretty much NO level of detail and if you get a few right in a row it’s pretty much guesswork
sometimes psych tests involve a certain level of bs… at that point i just kinda gave up and was like lol ‘1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1’
i got 79%, and at the end i could still distinguish a bit of detail in the faces
80% is the average, so i dont think youre supposed to be able to be able to make out much of the last ones normally. theyre probably there to see who’s better than average at it
Fun little test, got 60% right. Is it an accurate test or a just-for-fun thing?
I got “Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /psychologyexperiments/experiments/facememorytest/index.php
on this server.”The question is whether that means your score is 0%… (kidding)
Anyway I’ve no idea why you can’t access it, sorry. Anyone know?
Welp, 49%.
On the pixellation part, the thing is, your visual cortex has regions that are optimized to just do faces, and in fact it seems we compress faced down according to major features. According to the theory, this is why caricature works. In caricature, the artist is turning up exactly those aspects of a face that trigger our facial recognition faculties, which means that in caricature, you see a “more like the real person” version of the image.
At least in a sense “more like the real person.” It is a distillation of that person’s features, an optimization.
So by pixellating they are testing those regions of the brain. Can you recognize according to gross structure?
I cannot.
Interesting, thanks for explaining! And yeah I couldn’t, but I kinda assumed that would be really hard for anyone tbh? I do know I’m bad with faces though. I’ve had instances of old acquaintances walking up to me and asking how life has been, we have a whole catching up conversation in which I just wing it, and afterwards having to ask someone else who the heck that was. xD
I heard about this test a while ago – after reading about Oliver Sacks, who apart from writing fascinating books has really severe face blindness (he doesn’t recognise his own face) – and it explained so much. I finally understood why I can walk straight past friends I’ve known for years – or not be able to find them when they’re right near me. Why I look at virtually everyone and go ‘Err, do I know you’. Why I can’t recall people’s faces in my mind at all. Why hearing people’s voices is way more useful for me putting a name to them than seeing their face (although I kinda screwed my hearing in my teens (loud, loud music) and then more when I DJ’d at Uni – which doesn’t help with that side of things.
I score right on the line for potential diagnosis, but it was one of those ‘oh this is a thing, and I probably have it’ moments. Which was kinda cool and kinda frustrating.
In contrast, one of my friends got 90something%…
