How well do you recognize faces?

[Monique]

Take the test here: http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/
"Online Cambridge Face Memory Test"

The test does not rely on memory alone, as shadows and angles are changed during the test.
I was really surprised: I nonchalantly took the test and had them all right

 

[Moonbear]

I got 75% right. I had a harder time picking out faces by the end, not just because of the way they were obscured, but because I had seen so many by then, I was starting to have trouble remembering which were the targets and which just looked familiar because they were reused during the test. I can usually recognize my students even if I can't remember their names, so I think I'm okay with remembering faces I need to remember.

 

[GeorginaS]

89% but, yes, after seeing so many, and so very similar, my mind just started to get tired. I thought that was pretty interesting. I noticed I tended to focus on eyebrows and eyes more than any other characteristic.

 

[BWV]

Its an incredibly complex act of cognition if you think about it. There are autistic individuals with prodigous savant abilities, like Daniel Tammet who memorized pi to 20,000+ decimal places who are "face-blind" - unable to tell faces apart

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia

 

[Monique]

I had a harder time picking out faces by the end, not just because of the way they were obscured, but because I had seen so many by then, I was starting to have trouble remembering which were the targets and which just looked familiar because they were reused during the test.

Well, it is one of the variables that you face in real life too: pick out that one face among the many other familiar ones. I wonder how people would perform if they would use asian faces in the test, I always have a hard time recognizing those.

On the website there is another (but this one stupid) test: the famous faces test. I found out that it is very entertaining and entirely feasible to recognize faces that you know by look out the chin/mouth alone (my browser contantly displayed the bottom of the page).

 

[lisab]

I got 79%, which is much better than I expected.

The faces were starting to creep me out... !

 

[Mech_Engineer]

I got 96% correct. I've always been very good at recognizing faces, it's the names I can't remember worth a darn...