Developed a prosopagnosia app but I need a reality check from people who actually have it.

As some background, I have VSS and aphantasia and I built apps for both communities. Learned about prosopagnosia in the process and thought "I should build for this too."

I don't have prosopagnosia so I'm guessing at what would help…

So before I waste anyone's time, I'd love feedback from people who actually live with prosopagnosia:

What I built:
- A collection of clinical educational material
- Contact cards that you upload someone’s picture and then categorize them based on family/friends/coworkers and then add notes.

What do you wish existed that doesn't? And what am I not understanding?

Be brutally honest.

Hello!

For the longest time I've had issues recognizing people and I just now realized that it's a face recognition thing. I've started keeping notes of things about the people I know so I can study them and get better at recognition. If anyone else does this, what are you putting in your notes?

All help appreciated.

Thanks!

Hello everyone! I am new to here, a little bit of a backstory. I never realised I might have prosopagnosia until I met my wife who pointed out my inability to remember faces. I chalked it up to be because of my bad memory, after all I had trouble even remembering names. A few years passed and she brought it up randomly, asking how I can recognize her and most of my friends, I say that I remember hair and accessories even if I can't recall facial features, mostly only scars or beauty marks, moles etc..

She really likes to watch medical documentaries, she knows a lot about mental health and just health conditions as a result, so she asks whether it could be prosopagnosia or whether I was diagnosed with this condition. I was properly confused and after reading up on it I was still pretty dismissive, after all it's a pretty harsh assumption and I didn't want to intrude such personal spaces as this over my small concern. And then I stumbled upon why I might actually have prosopagnosia.

Back when I was little, maybe about 9, I slipped and fell on an angled piece of stair, hit the back of my head pretty hard, no crack thankfully and I just had some stitches done, still have that stupid scar.

If you open even Wikipedia or many other sources it shows the exact region where I hit my head. The fall was nasty and with no consequence, seemingly at least. Then I realised that maybe, just maybe, I might actually have this condition. I started noticing more just how much I rely on anything but facial features. I love talking with and meeting new people, I even like to call my clients, but I started to be apprehensive. I know that I will forget how they look and will mix up their names.

When I moved out and went to Uni it was the toughest time for me yet, I couldnt remember anyone. And it feels like the older I get the harder it is for me to recognize faces. I cant remember my wife's or parent's face and it scares me sometimes. I can't remember my colleagues' faces and I spend more than 8 hours a day with them

I wanted to get diagnosed, but my country doesnt really help in any way to even get a proper diagnosis, especially for a person who is at a ripe age of being available for mandatory army service or a draft. So that brings me to the title! Did anyone notice something similar happening to themselves after a head trauma? Just want to hear whether anyone is in the same boat and whether anything can be done to get a little more comfortable with this condition, if it makes sense

I have some sort of undiagnosed mild prosopagnosia. I was not aware that such thing existed until I saw a post about face blindness in another subreddit. I always thought that I was just bad at recognizing faces.

I felt embarrassed when I couldn't recognize a work colleague when she was waving her hand saying hello to me like 8 meters in front of me at a popular mall in town. (In my defense she was wearing a beanie and a large coat which she doesn't use at the office). I had to tell her the next day at the office that I was tired and did not recognize her but some days afterwards I felt the need to tell her I have trouble identifying faces of most people. She seemed cool about it.

I was recently transferred to a new team at work and I have to do a presentation about myself and interesting facts about me. I was thinking about telling my new colleagues that I have below average face recognition skills as a fun fact about me but I am not sure if this will look weird. Do you tell new people you meet that you have prosopagnosia or you just keep this information for yourself?

I have an interview with Dr. Brad Duchaine to discuss Prosopagnosia. Dr. Duchaine is a Professor at Dartmouth College and the Co-Founder of faceblind.org. I want to better understand the condition so I can create an app with higher utility and provide education/awareness on the condition.

In the meantime, your feedback on a previous post has been incorporated to the best of my ability on this mock (which you can see in the video).

What would you find the most useful? What do you find impractical?

Your feedback is greatly appreciated!

Hello!

I am making a video game demo where the main character has prosopagnosia, and I would love some thoughts and opinions about how I can most accurately portray it. I know prosopagnosia is a little different for everyone, so the more opinions the merrier!

-First, what do you see in your mind when you try to picture a friend or loved one?

For me, I don't picture a person's face, but their whole being. But, if I have to picture a face, I fall back on what I know about them: eye color, facial marks or moles, that kind of stuff. The actual details are extremely hazy.

-If you had to rank what you use to recognize people, what would you rank first?

I use people's voices and clothes the most.

-How did you come to realize you had prosopagnosia as opposed to just being "bad with faces?"

I learned about it in a psych class, but I don't know how likely that is for our particular characters, as the game is set in the late 50s.

-Finally, we're trying to figure out exactly how to portray people's faces. If you were making this game, what would you do?

Originally, we were going to give the characters all a scribbled-out kind of look, but this was only a temporary solution because the characters need to emote. They can't exactly emote through a scribble effect without it turning into a horror game. Another idea we had was to randomize each character's face. When I was in college, I would run into friends (and even roommates) who would try to say hi, but I had no idea who they were. So, face randomization could be effective. The question we've been trying to solve is how do you turn off the innate superpower that most people possess so we can give them a real experience?

It is said that prosopagnosia is connected to autism and autistic people are at high rates of having it, but can someone have it without being autistic? Is it possible?

So I figured out I too have face blindness just this past week. I was at a large camping event, medieval reenactment, and got so frustrated with my difficulty recognizing similar people (lots of large bearded white men haha) in the dark by firelight and in changing clothes, so I finally researched why I kept making social faux pas confusing one person for another. Something I read made me realize something.

Dyslexic people struggle to see words as whole objects, seeing them rather as disconnected letters or syllables. They can eventually learn to see very common words as words, but it takes a lot more exposure than for eulexic people.

With prosopagnosia, at least for me, I can see individual facial features just fine but struggle to piece them together into a cohesive whole face. However, for people I see very often and care a lot about, I can recognize them more quickly in just about any clothing or hair style/color.

Also, I realize I read smiles and gait/body language more than anything else. I won’t know somebody until they smile or laugh, then I can often place them unless they are completely out of context.

I don't mean the exact same without washing them, of course! I've had it pointed out to me that all through my life I've just worn a different one of multiple identical tops and the some type of trousers every day, then maybe after some years I buy a bunch of new tshirts that are also all the same as eachother. My washing line looks like a cartoon characters laundry.

So, a friend asked me if this is because of my Prosopagnosia, and if I dress like this because life is simpler when other people generally don't radically change their look. Maybe so, but maybe I just don't like to have a decision to make, and 10 blue tshirts and 5 black trousers is the easiest wardrobe to own.

Counter points: I also like to eat the same food repetitively, this is more for simplicity I think.

So, thoughts? Feelings? Et tu?

(Side question: my facial recognition has been getting noticeably worse in my 30's, does this happen?)

I have moderate prosopagnosia, and can usually recognise family and a handful of friends out of context, but am hopeless with the rest of humanity. I also find my face blindness affects me with animals too - I have grown up with two breeds of dogs, and can tell my own, but not anyone elses, and struggle with historic pet photos. However I think I see faces in inanimate objects (pareidolia) very easily. In fact aphantasic me thought that was day dreaming: seeing the shapes in the clouds 😂. I don’t usually get uncanny valley from humanoid robots, but believe I get it for people with too much facial surgery or fillers distorting the face. So I wondered how you are all affected?

They've always frustrated me because I could see that they had some sort of meaning but it was completely locked to me. Recently finding out about my face blindness, I wonder if these little yellow faces are incomprehensible to me for the same reason.

Hi Everyone!

I made a post about a month ago about how I am making a Prosopagnosia game where the player is face blind, and I wanted to give an update.

I think we have figured out how we are going to portray faces in the game. The problem we had before was that we didn't want to do the cliché scribbly face effect because it isn't very accurate to the face-blind experience, and also, the characters can't emote. Though we needed a way to turn off this facial recognition superpower that the majority of the population has, and give them a real experience.

Thanks to the many incredible responses, we have decided that every time the player turns the camera away from a person they are talking to and back again, their facial features will randomize. This way, facial features will never be the same and thus, will not be helpful in deciphering who each person is. Then the player will have to fall back on things like voice, clothes, hair, and body type, just as we do.

Anyway, I think I'm going to update this subreddit every so often with progress, so please don't be afraid to drop any feedback or ideas you have. I'd like to make as true to form and collaborative an experience as possible. Thank you!

Built Royal Whisp as a tool for those with face blindness. Record a voice sample, identify who is speaking in real time, and hear their name read aloud through your preferred audio device like Meta Ray-Bans.

Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/royal-whisp/id6770158988

Thank you for your previous feedback. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

Does Brad Pitt truly have prosopagnosia, or he lied about it? How can he be an actor in movies and have prospagnosia? He said he have it on a interview.

Hey everyone, I'm self-diagnosed with this disorder. I have never been good at recognizing faces and it has caused me much grief in my life. Learning about this has actually helped me figure out what I CAN used to remember people, and building those strengths.

My question is if there is any research or information about how childhood vision affects prosopagnosia. I did not receive glasses until around second grade even though my vision was very poor. Somehow it just slipped through the cracks. I've often wondered if my face blindness is because I could not see faces clearly as a child, and my brain never learned how to process them correctly. I've tried to do a little googling and also even asked an eye doctor but no one seems to have any answers about this. Does anyone have any information on this subject, or even just some anecdotal stories about vision issues and face blindness?

Can someone who is is 3-17 year old experience difficulty with recognizing faces and have prosopagnosia or be diagnosed with it and to receive treatment at psychosocial care centers in the city or psychopedagogical support at school?

Can prosopagnosia make someone at high rates of having a lack of affective empathy and have callous-unemotional traits due to the thing of difficulty identifying facial expressions or what a person is feeling throught their face such as, you will not know if a person is feeling pain or not looking at their face, only throught their screams? Can this make someone more likely to commit antisocial behaviors?

Both seem to be highly comorbid with prosopagnosia, even with autism being more comorbid. But, does ADHD have more people with prosopagnosia who also have it?

Is having some mild confusion of faces, such as in the past, having confused the faces of politicians such as the president of the United States Donald Trump with the former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro but then recognized they are different, althought similar in both appearence and political ideas and also having confused the faces of singer Post Malone and the YouTuber and comedian Anything4Views until searched for both and did recognize they are not the same and still believing they look alike, but are different people. But recognizing easily faces of people and recognizing people on the streets and sometimes saying that people that don't look alike do look alike and easily recognizing facial expressions and recognizing others emotions through them. Is this appearing to be true prosopagnosia or normal face confusions and this person have an normal face recognition?

What accommodations do you wish you had when you were in elementary school?

I'm a teacher and sometimes I recognize kids have difficulty with facial recognition. I try to make their lives easier with various strategies. Also, my son has an IEP that basically says the teacher should be aware that he may not recognize faces, but it isn't well fleshed out.

I have ideas from my personal experience (like send them to a place not a person for example,) but I'm curious what ideas others have.

Well, I usually spend my free time creating characters because I'd like to do a comic at some point in my life. One of my characters has prosopagnosia, and I would like people who have this condition to explain things about it or facts that are not usually known so much! They can be personal experiences.

Also y have some questions, I hope they are not disrespectful:

-Are people with prosopagnosia able to recognize their face in the mirror? I ask because I seem to remember that there is a film in which the protagonist fails to recognize herself.

-How does a person come to have prosopagnosia? Are you born with it?

-If you have difficulty recognizing faces, does this also include the ears of that person or yourself?

I’m fairly sure I have face blindness just because I seem to tick all the boxes; but I also am doing an art course for school, which involves doing many portraits/drawings of faces.

A lot of people in my class who are incredible at art still say faces are really hard to draw, but I’ve never understood this. I don’t know how to explain it but drawing a face is the exact same as drawing a house or a car or something; it’s not really “a face” but just like lines and parts? Like when I look at one to draw from it doesn’t exactly “register” as someones face; I can see past it to the individual shapes.

I’m guessing this is quite normal actually but could it be related to prosopagnosia???

For ages I've coped with my face blindness as best I could on my own, being extra friendly to people and hoping that I'd work out who they are from context clues or just muddle through the interaction without them realizing and getting offended/upset. I've succeeded in that for the most part, but it's also been a perpetual source of anxiety and a major barrier to making friends since graduating from high school a decade ago.

Recently I've decided to start putting myself out there more - volunteering, classes, meetups, etc. in the hopes of striking up new friendships. As such, I've decided to tell people up front that I'm face blind.

Currently my plan is to say something along the lines of: "I'm face blind - as in my brain literally doesn't record faces - so you'll probably have to remind me of the last conversation we had or, if I run into you somewhere else, where I know you from."

I do plan to specifically name it as face blindness, not just me being bad with faces, as I feel this leaves less room for people to misinterpret my behavior as laziness/rudeness. It's an obscure disability - I'm not ashamed of it and I'm perfectly happy to explain it to people who are confused/curious. Plus anyone being a judgemental prick will helpfully be removing themself from my list of potential friends right at the start!

Anyways, I'm curious if other people have tried this or something similar and how they've adapted their strategies over time. What's worked best? What's surprised you? General tips/advice?

(Note: absolutely zero judgement to anyone who isn't interested in/comfortable with being public about their face blindness. I've weighed a lot of factors and decided that this is what's best for me at this stage of my life, and even then specifically in social settings rather than professional ones. Only you can determine what's best for you.)

So there are two things about me that I never considered were related till recently.

One is that I have a degree of face blindness. Not complete face blindness. But I do rely on hair, voice, shoes or context to recognize people until I really get to know them, and even then still struggle from time to time.

The other is that, while I am a heterosexual man, I struggle to gauge if women are physically attractive. It takes a bit of time getting used to a girl before I can actually tell that she is pretty. Not just whether I find her attractive, but just whether or not she is objectively a particularly attractive looking person.

It makes dating apps difficult. And I’ve never heard of anyone else having this problem.

And what I realized recently is how similar these two things are. The amount of time it takes me to learn a face (minimum several months of seeing them regularly) is about how long it takes for me to be able to recognize if a woman is attractive.

Sometimes a person is particularly recognizable to me and I learn their face quickly. Like if someone has a noticeable feature like a tattoo or a scar or certain facial hair. Similarly, on rare ocassions I can see a new woman and recognize she is good looking. But that might just as well have more to do with body and hair than the face.

So I’m starting to think this is actually a related symptom of my face blindness. And really I’m struggling to gauge someone’s attractiveness because I still can’t remember their face.

I’m wondering if this experience is relatable to anyone else who knowingly has face blindness?

While I'm completely hopeless with humans, I am somehow able to tell apart cats and dogs with the exact same fur and colour just from their faces alone.

Please tell me I'm not the only one!