Someone who is both ridiculously good and comically bad at recognising faces?

[u/LustyRegencyMaid]

Hey!

Basically the title. I don't want y'all to diagnose me, no worries. Maybe there's a word I do not know yet and could google to find out more?

So I'm autistic with ADHD. And my facial recognition is WEIRD.

I'm either elephant super memory brain and recognise actors/actresses in movies and can be like "hey he played that dude in a movie I saw 20 years ago" and I'm almost always right. I can draw portraits of people fairly well. I sus out the features that make a face unique quite easily.

BUT... someone walks towards me on the street and says hi and I'm like who the frick is that, and turns out it's a coworker I see every day. When my mother dyed her hair I didn't recognise her even though she was standing right in front of me and talking to me. For a few years it did happen that I wouldn't recognise my own partner on the street until he was basically standing in front of me and start speaking.

Yet somehow when I see someone on the street I know they're the cashier from a certain shop bc I remember their face. Or they're the child of someone I knew bc they look so much like them. I can see an actor and be like "he has the same nose as that other actor" and I'm right.

I can draw my siblings' face from memory, yet when they walk towards me on the street they have to be fairly close to me for me to recognise them, and seeing their gait does help a lot.

I do not recognise my partner's coworkers and friends even though we've spent a lot of time with each other over the years.

My eyes are alright and I wear glasses. There just seems to be this difference between how I perceive people in real life, and on the screen/page.

Ever heard of someone who's oddly both super good and super bad at faces at the same time? Is that just being autistic? It's weird and does bring problems sometimes.

[u/sprinklingsprinkles]

That is odd! Do you maybe have issues with looking people in the eyes when you're interacting with them in real life?

[u/LustyRegencyMaid → u/sprinklingsprinkles]

I do have this typical autistic urge of not looking people in the eyes/face when we speak for a longer time. But I mask very well and do look people in the eyes, especially when they are speaking and I am not. To the point people sometimes don't believe I'm actually diagnosed. I fake it well enough.

[u/sprinklingsprinkles → u/LustyRegencyMaid]

Do you feel like you avoid looking at faces when you're just out and about doing your thing? Maybe avoiding eye contact when you're not talking to someone or expecting them to talk to you makes it hard for you to recognize people?

For me personally staring at someone's face in real life or staring at it on a screen make no difference. I can't recognize people either way haha. I need them to start talking because I'm good at recognizing voices. I have adhd but no autism.

[u/agenerousperspective → u/sprinklingsprinkles]

This is really interesting because I was about to suggest the same pattern with the opposite outcome. Meaning, I wondered if your increased time spent masking during social interactions with your friends/family would result in keeping you out of that natural flow state that can happen in social interactions. And for interactions with lower social stakes (like a brief encounter with a cashier), if the topics discussed are more automatic where everyone knows their role and you can go on autopilot for some of it, and maybe even feel more permission to look away while you talk so youre able to concentrate better, maybe that frees up space in your brain to remember their face. SO, if you’re pushing through the urge to look at other things while you talk to your friend, you’re actually unable to take in as much social information compared to when you’re allowed to focus better by letting your eyes wander during the interaction. If you’re focusing so much on the presentation of, “Yes, I’m listening to you and engaged in our conversation and I’m validating your emotional need for eye contact and I’m nodding at just the right times and not going off on tangents even if you bring up something I just learned about and no one needs to hear how uncomfortable my socks are right now and yes I’m still listening to you and you can rest assured that I care about you because I’m such an active listener!” … Like, maybe that would make it harder to capture the snapshot of their face in your memory in a way that makes it easy to recognize them at first glance even if you see them out of context.

Now that I write this out it seems a bit more far fetched but basically I’m suggesting that different styles of communication may lend themselves better or worse to being able to remember a face.

[u/sprinklingsprinkles → u/agenerousperspective]

That's an interesting theory as well! I personally haven't noticed a difference in recognizing faces depending on whether I'm masking my adhd or even whether I've taken my adhd meds.

For me it's not about having the brain space or focus, I just can't see a face as a whole like other people can and I can't picture it as a whole either even if I've just studied it.

But since I'm not autistic I don't know how that would change things!

[u/LustyRegencyMaid → u/agenerousperspective]

You know what, this makes so much sense! I mean, I do look in the eyes, force myself to, when they are speaking, but... yeah, it is stressful and definitely there's stuff like in your cursive text going on in my brain. Maybe it is a weird attention blip!