I don't think the first test is very good. I gave it to someone who I know is good at recognising people in real life, but who is not American, has no interest in celebrities, and also never watches films, and they scored badly (3, 20% centile). The second (Australian) test seems better, but, interestingly, the person just referred to didn't do very well in it. I wonder if recognising static images of faces is a significantly different task from recognising people in real life, or even from silent video, when you can see the face in action, as it were.
(There's the bizarre phenomenon, which people other than me have reported, how some people seem to consistently resemble photos of themselves, while others don't so much: they're almost a different person in photos. I think this phenomenon may also have to do with the face in action, but I'm just speculating wildly.)
People with prosopagnosia tend to develop compensation strategies that rely on attributes other than face. Hairstyle, body proportions, style of dress, posture, gait, mannerisms, voice, etc.. Under favorable conditions they (we? I scored 2) can be very good at recognizing people. That's why the test removes everything other than the face itself.
> There's the bizarre phenomenon, which people other than me have reported, how some people seem to consistently resemble photos of themselves, while others don't so much: they're almost a different person in photos.
I'm also just speculating wildly, but this might have something to do with (monoscopic) photography removing depth cues, which is also a factor in the phenomenon of "the camera adds ten pounds". Different lighting and some approaches to makeup and clothing can exaggerate or diminish this effect.
As someone with prosopagnosia, I definitely rely on cues like hair. (It works until someone gets a haircut or changes their facial hair.)
There used to be a great face blindness test online where it first showed you a bunch of full pictures of heads to memorize, then for the quiz it showed cutouts of just the face. I had no idea that I was relying on all these non-face features until they were dramatically removed for that test. (Which I bombed.)
Cool. I scored 97% on the second one, and 14 on the first one.
I did cheat a little bit on the first one by looking up their names on IMDB, because I can usually better remember which movie they were in and what role they played, than the name of the actor.
For the first one, marking an answer correct even if you don't know the person's name is explicitly the correct way to grade it. IMDB isn't ideal because it's so photo-heavy, but if you don't recognize the names you're going to have to look them up somewhere.
Wow. I scored 34% on the second one, i.e. no better than random guessing. The last part that added the random noise to the faces didn't make a difference, since I already couldn't do worse at the task.
I have to admit though that a few of the model faces were a bit featureless and hard to remember, so I mostly got those right by eliminating the other two faces in each group of three, because the wrong faces usually had prominent, memorable features.
The random noise made it harder, but if you squint and move your head around while looking at it, you can remove a lot of noise, it's a nice little "analog" trick for situations like that.
But 34%.. Do you think you suffer from prosopagnosia? Or was there something with the test that made it extra hard for you?
I once watched Up in the Air and had to ask at the end which one was George Clooney. (In my defense, I had previously seen him in Syriana, where he had a beard. Hair and facial hair are the crutches I tend to use to recognize people.) Needless to say, on the Famous Faces test I had trouble with anyone less memorable than, say, Barack Obama.
