Professor Josh P Davis
BSc MSc PhD AFBPsS FHEA CPsychol
Face and Voice Recognition Lab
School of Human Sciences
Institute of Lifecourse Development
University of Greenwich
London SE10 9LS
I’m Face Blind. Here’s What It’s Like.
Please find links to two articles from the USA, one on prosopagnosia by Sadie Dingfelder, who has extremely severe symptoms. I have never spoken before to someone with such high levels of face blindness. She cannot recognise photos of herself, Sadie published a book on her experiences this year, called, "Do I Know You?: A Faceblind Reporter's Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination" and she interviewed me for the book. It is always nice to see my name appear in the acknowledgments list, amongst loads of illustrious names.
What is astonishing is that as well as severe prosopagnosia, Sadie has aphantasia (an inability to create visual and also in her case verbal mental imagery), stereoblindness (she cannot see in 3D, something I studied at MSc level; it makes catching a ball virtually impossible), and severely deficient autobiographical memory which probably speaks for itself.
"Science writer Sadie Dingfelder has always known that she’s a little quirky. But while she’s made some strange mistakes over the years, it’s not until she accosts a stranger in a grocery store (whom she thinks is her husband) that she realizes something is amiss."
What I find most astounding (lots of superlatives here) is that Sadie has been a journalist for many years, working for the Washington Post and National Geographic and she is about to present a show on NBC TV (https://www.sadied.com/recapping-brilliant-minds/), when she cannot actually remember most of what she does in life. She is highly inspiring.
What I like most about the book so far, are the tongue in cheek descriptions of her experiences and even though this is at the end, it gives great advice to parents who are certain their child has prosopagnosia. Avoiding schools with uniforms is important and interestingly she suggests they should not necessarily seek official diagnoses and take tests like ours. Although our tests are mostly targeted at the top end of the ability spectrum, we do find that a small proportion coming in each week to take the www.superrecognisers.com tests are consistently low scorers. Some email us and some contribute to our research programme. They seem happy to have their beliefs about their own ability confirmed, but these are nearly all adults. It might be different for children.
However, I have been placed on the naughty step by Sadie, I was sent a copy of the book after I beat a group of other contributors in a competition to describe in a silly manner a photo of Sadie, and Sadie's dog and relate it to face recognition.
I have never seen her dog, but, jokingly, I wrote something around the fact that her face recognition ability and her dog recognition ability via vision, touch, and smell were so bad, that she was in fact cuddling her neighbour's dog. Meanwhile her neighbour had posted photos of their missing dog all over the internet, and I was just about to claim the $1000 award, while outing Sadie as the evillest snatcher of dogs since Cruella de Vil.
In return, I promised to review the book. It is great, but I am so busy, I am still only on page 105, only another 180 to go.
I’m a Super-Recognizer. Here’s What It’s Like.
I was interviewed for the second article by Jana Koslowski a couple of months ago. Jana is a volunteer member of our Greenwich Face and Voice Recognition Lab participant pool and seems to have first taken our tests during a lockdown period. She must have contributed at a time participants were directly entered into our research as she took the Long-Term face Memory Test. I like this article because unlike the majority, there is very little focus on policing and crime. Instead, she provides excellent anecdotes describing what living day-to-day life with super-recognition is like. There are some positive comments from readers too, which are always nice to see.
Video By Jana Koslowski and Sadie Dingfelder
However, I think my favourite, just because it is very different, is a joint video they placed on Instagram and Twitter. I think it is fun and informative in how it demonstrates what super-recognisers can and prosopagnosics cannot do in a very irreverent manner. I have asked if I can use it in the future in my teaching.
Enjoy!
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