Prosopagnosia isn't actually about remembering the names that go with faces.
I got 111.
I don't feel I was particularly concentrating, though. The first phase lasted long enough that I started getting bored. I suspect if I'd had half the number of faces, or it had gone by faster, I'd have done better.
I don't actually think I'm great at matching names and faces. I am fairly good at remember people I've met or seen before, though. Basic face recognition, rather than face plus name.
Speaking of casino greeters I was recently slightly dumbfounded to have been remembered after a gap of about two months by a guy with whom I interacted for all of about five minutes.
As written the above is likely to generate lots of winking replies, isn't it?
Yes. If people get a different hair style or new glasses or change clothes, then I have trouble. This thing had many non-facial cues so I did fine.
Prosopagnosia isn't actually about remembering the names that go with faces.
To be fair, neither is the test.
I did much better than I thought I would (109 or 84% correct), but it's a much easier task to recognise a face/name pair than to recall a name given a face. If it had been the latter (even with multiple choice), I'd have got maybe 10% correct.
Speaking of casino greeters I was recently slightly dumbfounded to have been remembered after a gap of about two months by a guy with whom I interacted for all of about five minutes.
Don't they have facial recognition cameras for card counters etc and just pipe the names into the greeters' earpieces
I have reason to believe that that was not at issue.
9: that would be a significantly worse solution that hiring people who are good at remembering people they've met.
Also this test is terrible. Terrible!
I got 122. I got bored as hell in the study phase or I'd have done a lot better. I also don't actually do well with remembering names IRL. People I've met before, or seen in meetings? I remember meeting them, often for as long a gap as you like.
Actually I'm not sure what they're testing. If they're testing whether gender-consistent name/image pairs are more memorable than gender-inconsistent name-image pairs then it isn't bad. But it's going to be pretty easy for a lot of people for reasons that really have nothing to do with face memory.
I haven't taken the test, but I'll mention that People Are Not Very Good at Matching Photographs to People.
In one test, passport officers had to decide whether or not a photograph of an individual presented on their computer screen matched the face of a person standing in front of their desk.
It was found that on 15% of trials the officers decided that the photograph on their screen matched the face of the person standing in front of them, when in fact, the photograph showed an entirely different person.
16: people are not very good at matching photographs of unfamiliar people to people. They're essentially perfect at matching photographs of familiar people to those people.
But that study is fantastic, and the people who did it would very much agree with my comments 12 and 14.
15% seems pretty good. Better than bouncers were at getting people with borrowed driver licenses when I was in college.
They don't give you long enough to come up with "I'll think of my friend Tony when I see this face named Tony." Then I got distracted so I didn't actually take test.
9: that would be a significantly worse solution that hiring people who are good at remembering people they've met.
I'm sure they do that too, but what I mean is they've got the facial recognition technology going on anyway for people they want to keep out, so they might as well use it for people they want to keep in as well.
18: that's using recent, high-quality images. If the images are older (like a license picture taken two years ago, say) the error rate rises substantially (to above 20%).
I got 114 which is way, way better than I thought I was doing during the test. I can't help but suspect that I just got lucky on a bunch of them.
20: sure, right, of course. But facial recognition is shitty, is my point.
21: It's probably even higher when the incentive for being right is not getting to take money from somebody.
Especially when it's facial recognotion from odd angles, like you'd see with a casino surveillance camera system that's mostly up at ceiling level. But even with good quality pictures, once a greeter had seen somebody more than three or four times at most they would be dramatically better than any computer system yet devised.
24: right. Darkness and folded up twenties hinder unfamiliar face recognition.
18: I had a fortuitous fake ID in college -- a friend's boyfriend picked up a lost over-21 college ID he found on his (different) campus, noticed the picture looked like me, and gave it to me rather than returning it like a good citizen. Consistently, when I used it, it'd get a long look to the ID, long look back at me, and then some version of "You should change your hair back -- it looked much better that way."
I knew a woman who got caught because she was 5'8" or so and the license she borrowed was from somebody 5'1".
Problems:
* Vast majority of surnames Anglo - probably giving advantage to Brits who are more used to keeping hordes of Taylors, Smiths, and Watsons straight
* Some male names with female faces (Gerry) and vice versa (Billie)
* Instead of mixing up names and faces previously shown, they showed a lot of completely new names and/or new faces, so I could mark it as "new" without necessarily having the connection in my head
Still, I got a score of 114, 79th percentile, 88% correctly identified, which I did not expect.
34th percentile here, and I think that may have been misleadingly high; like Minivet, I think I was reliably eliminating the totally new names, which made guessing on the rest easier.
But I nearly had a panic attack during the study phase -- the faces just kept coming. If it had gone on for about twenty more seconds I would have quit because I couldn't handle it.
I got 90, and am astonished that 18% of the testers did worse than I did. I am really dreadful not just with matching faces to names, but with understanding whether a face I see is one I have seen before.
I was trying to show Sally the face-recognition quiz linked here a couple of years ago, but the site (assuming I successfully located the same site) had a different quiz up on recognition of celebrities. Given how bad I am at face recognition generally, I was surprised to be flawless on the celebrities I know. I think I must be deeply terrible at learning to recognize faces, but once a face makes it into my memory, I'm fine at retrieving them.
I got a 116 and I self identify as someone, like Nworb, who can neither match names to faces nor tell whether a face is one I've seen. (And actually there were a couple in the test phase that I was sure about but I just answered wrong because of a clicking error or being distracted.) But I don't think it was really testing either of those skills, if the face-name pairs were consistent.
Also, I used a strategy -- I tried to quickly come up with a mnemonic when the face/name was first presented, and it often worked.
105 (52nd percentile). I don't know if the instructions would have helped, but I assumed I would have to match names with faces and, like Heebie, I was trying to come up with mnemonics, which worked for, like, 5 seconds; after about 20 faces I said, Oh, fuck this and just waited for it to end; then I thought the test itself was surprisingly easy. I feel like I could have done somewhat better if I knew what was being tested.
79%/103, below average, but not as far below as I would have thought. However, several of the "no" answers I picked up on simply by recognizing that the name hadn't flown by me before. (Forex, I don't think there was a single Irish name in the first group, and there were several in the second go-around).
16: I had a weird interaction with a TSA agent not long ago. She kept looking at my ID and saying things like "this doesn't look like you. This is you? I can see a little resemblance. You're not trying to get by with your older brother's ID, are you?" At first I thought she was bored and just bantering, but it went on for long enough that it seemed like she was actually suspicious that I was using someone else's ID. Then she shrugged and let me through.
Not falling for this one. I have plenty of better ways to torture myself if I want to do that.
So 79% correct is a bit below the median, but 88% is in the top quartile. Surprisingly narrow range of variation.
39: it's too easy. One of the big problems with it.
That's easy? Jesus. Like I said, the study phase nearly gave me a heart attack.
If anyone happens to be reading here who pseudonymously works in a lab that studies this stuff, is the celebrity recognition test I mentioned in 33 something you know about? And is there an explanation for why that wasn't hard for me?
Let me tell you if you like like my mother!
41: but you still got, what, 75% of them right. That's a badly designed psychological measure. If you were really that bad you should have been close to 50%.
To this day, I have no idea who is Bill Paxton and who is Bill Pullman.
The big thing I learned from previous recognition tests is that I can't look at large numbers of faces in a short amount of time without becoming so uncomfortable that rather than try to figure out if I recognize a face, I just want to stop. It only just occurred to me that this fits with my uncomfortableness when I'm by myself in groups of people in crowded places.
Also, if a magazine cover has someone's face on it and the cover is facing up and it's constantly visible from where I'm sitting, at some point if I sit long enough I'll turn it over to stop from feeling stared at. But maybe that's a different problem.
45: Bill Paxton was Hudson in Aliens. Bill Pullman was the president in Independence Day.
If you're going to be fighting aliens, Bill Pullman is probably the one you want on your side.
46.1 gets it right. Is there a difference in long term and short term facial recognition capacities? I do okay on these tests, but in real life when it's someone I haven't seen in a while, particularly if they're out of context, I'm pathetic.
I know Bill Paxton was the vocalist for late-80s Devo-esque pop band Martini Ranch. And Bill Pullman was not. But somehow this does not connect to a knowledge of which one of them was the actor in any of their movies.
Another for 46.1. Someone trying to psychologically torture me could do a lot of damage by just making me look at pictures of faces for a long time.
Now I want to watch Lake Placid again. When Betty White leads the cow into the lake, that was one of the great moments of cinema.
46, 48, 50: you might find this interesting. Generally, looking directly at somebody causes massive amygdala activation; there is an argument that hyperactivity in the amygdala is what drives aversion to eye contact in people on the autism spectrum.
"I know your eyes are up there, but looking at them would cause massive amygdala activation."
Just watch that entire episode of Going Deep! It's on Hulu and it is very enjoyable! Everyone watch Going Deep now!
I feel so vindicated for calling LB a robot all these years.
47: further to that, Bill Paxton has the unique distinction of having been killed by a Predator, an Alien and a Terminator.
Bill Paxton was Hudson in Aliens. Bill Pullman was the president Lone Starr in Independence Day Spaceballs.
55: I'd come out there and beat you up for that, but of course I have no possible way of figuring out who you are.
57 is, regretfully, far more helpful to me than previous attempts.
54 is true, but is not incompatible with watching the 3 minute segment in 52 additionally or in advance. If you're the kind of person who watches videos on the internet, of course.
Ogged, for your sake I hope there are other people with your name and yours is one of the later entries in your local phone book.
If you're going to be fighting aliens, Bill Pullman is probably the one you want on your side.
Fucking A, man. I'm getting short Four more weeks and out. I don't want to die on this fucking rock. I mean game over, man! Game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?
62: in, respectively, Aliens ("Game over, man!"), Predator 2 and Terminator. He may have survived Terminator - he's one of the punks who gets beaten up by the Terminator at the start of the film - but he probably didn't have a good day.
Oh, I probably would too, unless you put him in a room with another tall skinny guy with medium-brown skin, a big nose, and eyelashes like Bambi. Within that category of people, I'd be picking at random.
I'm much whiter since I moved back to the midwest. It's like camouflage.
Those of us who put in an email address to take the retention test tomorrow can post those results then. I bet it'll be a lot harder.
Oh, being less tan than when I met you? That's cheating, and nullifies any obligation I have to recognize anyone. See also clauses covering haircuts, facial hair, hats, and changes in style of clothing.
Just to rag on the test in the OP a little more, you'll note that skin tone, haircut, facial hair, hat and clothing style are all mechanisms that could be deployed to succeed at the task. Even things like "note color of background" or "note average brightness of image" would work.
My contract reserves the right to freak the fuck out if you put on a hat.
The oggeds that couldn't blend with the lighter colored bark of trees in the midwest were eaten by birds.
Speaking of Bill Paxton, I just watched the series finale of Big Love. It totally jumped the shark and I'm still all weepy anyway.
74: Did you think it jumped the shark right at the end or, oh, about Season 2 or so? That show suffered from not seeming to realize that Bill Henrickson was basically a bad person who didn't deserve to succeed in his cunning plans and crazy capers.
75: I think the show's writers were pretty clear on the fact that Bill wasn't all that bright, at least. I thought the ending was essentially a fantasy wrapped in a bow for the viewer. The anti-Sopranos ending.
I thought it jumped the shark abruptly in Season 4, with [spoilers?] his political ambitions. I didn't necessarily think of him as a good or bad person - not a duplicitous person, takes all types to make a world go round, etc.
Agree with 77. I gave up during Season 4. Now I can't remember whether I saw the finale or not.
And I checked the recap of the last episode and, no, I hadn't. Oh well. Spoilers!
pretty clear on the fact that Bill wasn't all that bright, at least.
Although he gained miracle brains in the last season, with all these extemporaneous speeches and volumes of facts on the tips of his fingers.
The reason I though he was a bad person was because he took all kinds of crazy risks and hurt all kinds of people out of, basically, greed, horniness and egotism, and always managed to rationalize it as God's Plan.
Heavenly Father wants him to sleep around, Yawny.
I cannot imagine trying to be married to someone who claims to receive "testimonies" that are absolutely rigid and immutable.
But, eh, they seem to love each other.
It's fun trying to have an argument about that show when I now only half-remember it. Mostly I just remember thinking all the time what an incredibly good set up for a TV show the polygamous family turned out to be. Also I don't remember thinking Bill was extremely evil, just normal-guy evil, though they also had the affirmatively evil compound dwellers to make him look better. Until he became a politician, which was just boring and stupid.
I don't think you're wrong, Yawnoc, I guess I just think the writers were pretty clear on how egotistical and self-deluded he was. He benefits from contrast with the people on the compound, but that just demonstrated that there weren't a ton of great choices, for Nicki especially. Halford has it right, I think. I think the show is pretty explicit that Barb has lots of justification for deep resentment of Bill for talking her into that shit while she had cancer and felt very vulnerable, even though she loves her sister-wives and in the end they're the family that will really sustain her. That's why I say the ending's a gift to the viewer.
I will say that Sons of Anarchy has just gotten beyond embarrassing and stupid recently,even for me, even if it was always in the dumb but fun zone. "Torture porn, ludicrously over-complex ethnic gang dispute skillfully manipulated to keep lead character alive, random bikini babe, evil Mom is evil, dudes ride bikes, torture porn, dudes ride bikes, extremely long montage shot with people looking profoud, show is still going on, dudes ride bikes, torture porn."
86.last: Having read the last sentence of the plot summary in the Wikipedia page, I don't get why.
Oh god, I nearly panicked like LB. Still got a 109/84%, which is stunning to me. If you had shown me a picture of one of the people without a name and asked me to supply a name, I would have gotten a 0. Will report back tomorrow on the long-term memory, but I guarantee you my results will drop substantially in comparison to the norm.
The end of Big Love is very similar to the end of (SPOILERS) Breaking Bad in some ways. I don't know if it's kosher to delve into it, but in both cases I think the writers let their protagonists off the hook a bit too easily.
I'm waiting for Thanksgiving break before I read the Breaking Bad entry in Wikipedia. It's nice to have holiday entertainment.
86: Okay, boy, am I procrastinating today, and it's fun to talk about prestige television:
The show (now lots of spoilers) wasn't going to rub its hands together and cackle at Bill's death. He loved his family; his family loved him. He wasn't the villain, but he wasn't a hero either, and for all the wives periodically recited how much they owed to him, it's pretty obvious he caused a lot of their problems, it was just that what he offered was better than death/rape and enslavement/being a child with an alcoholic mother, respectively. Showing him as a ghost, only able to mutely express love, but with no ability to interfere in Nicki, Marge, and Barb's relationship and lives is, like, everything you could have wanted for those three. Grief over Bill's death, especially after he "grants" Barb the authority she richly deserves, is satisfyingly sentimental, but does anyone watch the ending and think, oh, noes, what will they ever do without him? His death basically leaves everyone better off, it protects the family from his idiot feuding, and you get to see the sister-wives in a warm, uncompetitive, peaceful intimacy it was hard for them to achieve while they were under his thumb and subject to his schemes. No one is shown overwhelmed by grief, IIRC.
I thought the show was great, in part because it portrayed this intensely patriarchal family in a warm, humane, and complicated way. They love and support each other and their dynamics are really messed up, which is like a lot of families, but it's obvious and explicit that the patriarchy part isn't positive, though the large net of caring relationships is. If anything I thought the ending was too neat and happy.
Lb you are my sister. Right down to the rising panic at all these faces. if only we could recognise one another!
I have just come away from a party where I was tortured by failing to know the name of someone I have known and intermittently worked with for twelve years. I recognised her face, you see. So the name was inaccessible. Only now that the train is twenty miles from her do I remember the name without effort or strain
I just clicked the link and took the test. I don't really get it. You could pass by remembering either faces or names or some combination thereof; it has nothing to do with associating the right name to the right face. I got 98%. On the other hand, I recently didn't recognize someone I've known for years. To be fair, he was wearing big sunglasses.
Oops. I got 96% right, which was 98th percentile. I forgot what they said that was as a score. 124 or 126 or something like that.
92: Is Big Love written by John Ringo or something?
Wait, this Going Deep thing you guys have been talking about is a TV show done by the same guy who did the artisanal pencil sharpening thing? I would not have guessed that pencil sharpening was a route to television stardom.
97: yeah. But before getting into pencil sharpening he also did super-acerbic anti-war comics so, you know how TV is.
Although the TV show is really a natural outgrowth of the pencil sharpening so, yeah, go figure.
There's someone I've been on a committee with for years. I know perfectly well that name is Alison, but the other day I introduced her to my wife saying "you remember Angela, don't you?' Is there a name for this kind of confusion, other than early-onset dementia?
The artisanal pencil sharpening guy is the same guy as the Get Your War On guy? And now he has a TV show I've never heard of?
Careers in the 21st century, man.
Is he also the author of Fafblog, and hundreds of thousands of completely humorless, angry and condescending blog comments?
I bought his pencil sharpening book as part of a sale by whatever small publishing house put it out, and they never sent it to me. But I didn't want to complain, because it's good to support small struggling incompetent businesses.
104: Does that mean you are still using a pencil-sharpening service?
I remember all kinds of facts about people, and I usually recognize them, but I don't do well at recognizing faces on their own. I'm pretty terrible at describing people's emotions on the test where all you can see is the person's eyes, nose and a bit of the brow.
My father takes great pride in remembering names but is actually kind of bad at it, so is constantly, confidently looking people right in the eye and calling them by the wrong name. It's awkward.
103: Wait, hold on. Who's the purported author of Fafblog? stras?
I only agree with parts of 92. Nicki herself is, hands down, a total trainwreck, even though I mostly think believably so. (A bit of a self-parody near the end.) Marge is susceptible to Ponzi schemes and so on. Barb is kind of a saint, although realistic in that it makes her kind of unlikable. I agree they're probably better off without Bill, but only marginally so - how on earth are they supporting themselves?
92 seems right to me. Don't they just divide up that sweet casino money from Bill once he's gone three ways? It does seem like there could be some interesting legal squabbles over the assets, which I'd be happy to write up in the most boring fan fiction ever.
112: According to the "About Fafnir" link on fafblog, you're Fafnir.
the most boring fan fiction ever
Oh, man, it could be like the litigation equivalent of fantasy football. Fictional characters sue each other, all evidence has to be derived from what's in the show, and lawyers who are really into their day jobs brief the cases for fun.
Suddenly, erotic fan fiction seems normal and healthy.
I definitely agree with the last paragraph of 92, though. As Halford said, it's a great premise for a show. They were so much fun to watch.
Fictional characters sue each other, all evidence has to be derived from what's in the show, and lawyers who are really into their day jobs brief the cases for fun.
Oh God I can actually see this happening.
Add high schoolers & that's pretty much mock trial, speaking of which case packet supposed to be released today. Should check that.
Oh, man, it could be like the litigation equivalent of fantasy football.
You mean...Tugwater?
"testimonies" that are absolutely rigid and immutable
Might wanna get a biopsy if that's the case, gentlemenz.
I got 118, 91%. I'll do the long-term part tomorrow.
As Tweety suggested in 14, I think they may actually be testing how memorable gender-consistent name-face pairs are compared to gender-inconsistent ones. There certainly were an awful lot of gender-ambiguous names, and a lot of fairly androgynous faces too.
Oh, man, it could be like the litigation equivalent of fantasy football. Fictional characters sue each other, all evidence has to be derived from what's in the show, and lawyers who are really into their day jobs brief the cases for fun.
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce (Mary Sue intervening).
117, 119: Predictably, this sort of exists in DC. Every year the Shakespeare Theatre has a fundraiser where they get a bunch of SCt/DC Cir judges and a couple SCt bar all-stars to put on an argument over whether, e.g., Isabella can sue the Duke for Angelo's abuses of power. It's about as fun as it sounds.
OK, I got the follow-up and did the second-day retention test. 79th percentile for short-term recognition, 43rd percentile for long-term. (71% correct, score 100.)
On the second day I got a score of 138, in the 99th percentile, identifying 93% correctly. For a few of them I thought they were showing me faces that didn't come up in the study phase but did come up in the testing face on the first day, but I might have been wrong about that.
First day, 111, second day: 105. Holy cow, essear.
Wow, I did way worse the second day. 101, 72%. I'm not entirely sober, though, which may have skewed the results a bit.
I lasted about 6 faces. I'd rather do just about anything than take a test like that. You people scare me.
After the second time I'm even more inclined to think that they're actually testing the effects of gender-neutral or gender-nonconforming names. It was really striking this time how many of them there were.
The lab that seems to be behind it appears to focus more on language than on facial recognition per se, which strengthens my suspicions.
Took follow up:
Score: 111
Percentile: 72
Percent correct: 78
So it just emailed me a third time to take the test again (not sure if this was an error or if they do want to test people three times) and I did. I did notably better than yesterday but worse than the day before: score of 111, 78% correct.