Viewers With Prosopagnosia Enjoy TV and Movies and Plays and Comics With Diverse Casts

These are two characters from "Sense8." I honestly don't know which two they are.

These are two characters from “Sense8.” I honestly don’t know which two they are.

Or, at least, I do.

I’ve got prosopagnosia, aka face blindness.1 I’ve recently started watching “Arrow,” which is a TV show about a bunch of muscular, thirtyish, conventionally handsome, mostly white men plus a few really thin, twentyish, conventionally pretty mostly white women. And usually I deduce who I’m looking at based on context, but it’s common for a scene to begin and I’m looking at some young fit short-haired white guy in some context that doesn’t tell me who I’m looking at, and I genuinely have no idea what character I’m watching. There was an episode in which another hooded archer, a bad guy, unmasked himself at the end, and there was a dramatic musical sting to let the audience know that GASP! this was a big shocking reveal, and I had no idea who I was looking at.

This happens to me a lot when watching TV or plays or movies or reading comics. When I started watching “Friends,” it took me most of a season before I could tell Joey and Chandler apart, or which one was Monica and which one was Rachel.2 And as diverse as it was in many ways, I had a very hard time telling Lito, Wolfgang and Will apart when I was watching “Sense8.”

The more visually diverse characters are – in terms of skin color, age, body shape, facial characteristics, etc – the easier it is for prosopagnosiacs (not sure that’s a real word) to enjoy any form of visual storytelling. And current estimates are that between 1 and 2 percent of the population has prosopagnosia, which is millions of people.

I’m not trying to make a big moral point with this post. I’m just saying that, for 1 or 2% of people, it’s probably easier to know which character is which when the characters are visually diverse. If all else is equal, that might be a reason for cartoonists and other creators to err on the side of being more diverse instead of less.3

  1. At least, I believe I have prosopagnosia. I’ve never been officially diagnosed. []
  2. For some reason, Ross and Phoebe didn’t look like the others to me – I think perhaps because both of them diverge, to at least some degree, from the usual cookie-cutter faces casting directors seem to prefer. []
  3. I’m not saying I’ve been perfect in this regard. I’ve made a mental note to try and do better. []
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38 Responses to Viewers With Prosopagnosia Enjoy TV and Movies and Plays and Comics With Diverse Casts

  1. 1
    Ruchama says:

    Arrow does get more diverse as the seasons go on, though I have been getting annoyed that every white woman on the show seems to become blonde after a while. (Current main cast is muscular 30-something white guy, muscular 40-ish black guy, 30-ish thin white woman with long blonde hair and glasses, 30-ish thin white woman who used to have brown hair but now has long blonde hair, 20-ish thin white woman with short brown hair, 60-ish white man with short hair, and white man who, by plot logic, should be about 60, but is played by the 48-year-old John Barrowman who somehow still looks exactly like he did ten years ago. Plus several recurring characters who are black men, and one mixed-race white and Asian woman. But, yeah, they do cast a whole lot of square-jawed muscular white guys.)

  2. 2
    Ruchama says:

    I’m not sure if I qualify as face-blind, but I’m really terrible at recognizing faces. I’ve been teaching long enough that I’ve developed a lot of tricks for remembering, though, so I’m a lot better at it than I used to be.

  3. 3
    annqueue says:

    Yup, I can relate.

    I’ve sometimes thought maybe it was just my Scandinavian heritage causing me problems, because the default is to only look someone in the eye upon finishing speaking – like passing the talking stick or something. (This was really annoying to an Italian-heritage teacher I had in high school, btw; he kept telling me to look at him when I was speaking.) But that test you posted the other day, it gave a set time to look at the faces, and I still scored fairly low. And the fact that I have trouble with visual media, which you can stare at as long as you like, that’s another indicator that the trouble isn’t just me not *looking* at the faces, it’s more than that.

  4. 4
    MJJ says:

    “For some reason, Ross and Phoebe didn’t look like the others to me – I think perhaps because both of them diverge, to at least some degree, from the usual cookie-cutter faces casting directors seem to prefer.”

    Does prosopagnosia have an ethnic component (i.e. is it easier to recognize people of one’s own ethnicity than people of other ethnicities?) I can’t help notice that the two characters you have the easiest time recognizing are the two characters played by Ashkenazi Jews (I believe you are Ashkenazi)? None of the other four are noted on Wikipedia as having Jewish ancestry.

  5. 5
    Jake Squid says:

    Yeah, I gave up on Once Upon A Time because I couldn’t tell any of the women apart so I had no idea what was going on at any time. It was a truly frustrating experience.

  6. 6
    Ampersand says:

    Does prosopagnosia have an ethnic component (i.e. is it easier to recognize people of one’s own ethnicity than people of other ethnicities?) I can’t help notice that the two characters you have the easiest time recognizing are the two characters played by Ashkenazi Jews (I believe you are Ashkenazi)?

    I have no idea if prosopagnosia has an ethnic component, but that’s certainly an interesting idea. (And yes, I am Ashkenazi.)

  7. 7
    Elusis says:

    I gave up on House of Cards in part because of the vast number of clean-cut generic white guys wearing suits. Kevin Spacey, I can recognize. Everybody else, I kept having to ask my partner “is this the guy who’s sleeping with his intern?” “No, it’s the guy who is working against Kevin Spacey’s plan.” “OK, is this the same guy?” “No, that’s another guy.” “Now, have we seen this guy before? Where?” “……”

    This happens a lot with procedurals. “Should I know who this guy is?” “Yes, he was at the dinner where they arrested the first guy.” “You mean the first guy’s friend?” “No, the guy sleeping with his friend’s wife.”

    It’s tiring. And, more interesting looking and diverse actors really help.

  8. 8
    desipis says:

    1-2% isn’t insignificant. I wonder if there’s a case for some sort of character labelling; like subtitles except have the characters name hovering roughly under/over the face of the character (not unlike many video games have names near their avatars). I imagine with face recognition technology something like that may even be able to be automated to a certain extent.

  9. 9
    annqueue says:

    There’s no ethnic component for me. What I picked up on in the picture above was one guy is blonde and the other isn’t, so I can tell them apart, yay! I have troubles with groups of people with similar hair, skin, and eyes no matter what their ethnicity.

  10. 10
    LTL FTC says:

    Desipis:

    I wonder if there’s a case for some sort of character labelling; like subtitles except have the characters name hovering roughly under/over the face of the character (not unlike many video games have names near their avatars).

    Can we also get this on subtitled TV and movies as well? Like, yesterday?

  11. 11
    sam says:

    You’ve probably heard it, but there was a really great episode of RadioLab where they discussed face blindness, and interviewed two fairly famous (for other reasons) people who have the condition – Oliver Sacks and Chuck Close. Sacks was a friend of the show and always interesting when he was on, but the more fascinating story was Chuck Close, who made his living drawing people’s faces!!! But couldn’t actually tell people apart when looking at them.

    Link, just in case you’ve managed to not here the episode until now…

  12. 12
    annqueue says:

    To expand a bit on the ethnic thing, I do wonder how the stereotype of ‘you all look the same’ is tied into this. Hair and eye color are, at least to me, much more diverse among northern Europeans, and are really easy markers for me to keep track of. So yeah, it’s easier for me to tell apart those folks. Though it took me months of stopping by the bike shop to be able to tell apart the two women with brunette shoulder length hair – which was really important to do, because they are in fact very different in a couple of key ways and wouldn’t have appreciated being mistaken for each other.
    With Black and Asian folks (and Latino and middle eastern to a lesser extent), I have to pay attention to different markers – hairstyle and shape of nose being the two that help me the most. Shape of eyes and skin tone are also helpful, but help less if I’m not seeing the potentially confusing people next to each other. (This guy has a part shaved in by his temple, that one doesn’t, vs. this guy is lighter skinned than that guy.)
    I’m happy to have found a couple of ways to at least even out my poor face recognition among all ethnicities. I could see someone less concerned with being PC not paying attention though.

  13. 13
    Nuño says:

    Can you differentiate comic book faces?

  14. 14
    Ampersand says:

    Sam – Actually, listening to that episode of RadioLab is what first caused me to self-diagnose! I was listening to Sacks’ narrative and in almost every way “that’s just like ME!” It was really nice to be able to put a name to it.

  15. 15
    Ampersand says:

    Nuño – Sometimes I can, sometimes I have trouble. It really depends on the cartoonist.

  16. 16
    Nancy Lebovitz says:

    Uniforms make it even harder to remember who’s who.

  17. 17
    Lirael says:

    Huh. I took that Cambridge Face Memory Test that you include an image from in your post below. I got a 54%, which is much worse than the 80% average for adults, and below the 60% “You may have prosopagnosia” threshold. I’ve always felt I was bad at remembering who’s who but prosopagnosia never occurred to me before.

    And I have the same reaction to casts with diverse vs non-diverse appearances that you’re talking about here. I really have trouble with a lot of older movies where the characters in, say, workplace settings, are all clean-cut gender-conforming white men. I can’t remember who’s who! This would probably be true if the characters were all some other very specific type but I see fewer such movies, from any era (wonder how I’d do with blaxploitation movies).

  18. 18
    Jake Squid says:

    It took me about two years to stop mixing up Rudy & Herbert at work. They look nothing alike and it made Herbert really unhappy each time I called him Rudy. In my defense, I’ve never seen them together. Maybe I’m a lot more perceptive than I think and I’m just being gaslighted.

    When people tell me that I’ve met them before I tell them that I’ll take their word for it and I’m just terrible with faces and names. There was a point in my life, in the first few years after I’d moved out, where I couldn’t imagine my mom’s face and was very worried about what was going to happen when she picked me up at the train station.

    But what Chuck Close said about long exposure is true for me, too. If I see somebody regularly over a long period of time, I’ll learn to recognize them. And then I won’t notice changes in them (hairstyles and colors, growing or shaving a beard, etc.). Alas, I lack Chuck’s charm so that strategy isn’t going to work for me.

  19. 19
    annqueue says:

    Sometimes I have trouble with comic books.

    The not noticing changes thing – I totally do that. My husband will shave his moustache and I won’t notice for like a week.

  20. 20
    Maxicat says:

    I’ve got to where I won’t watch shows with too many pretty white people unless the show is otherwise well written. I found I couldn’t watch Lost Girl because 2 of the main characters kept passing around a blond wig which made it impossible for me to tell which one was on screen.

  21. 21
    closetpuritan says:

    I’m pretty sure I don’t have face blindness*, but I do have trouble recognizing characters sometimes in TV shows that, based on the way they’re written, the creators expect me to be able to recognize. I’ve joked before that they need to slap some anime hair on those samey white ~30-year-old muscular-but-not-enough-to-stand-out dudes.

    I shared this post on facebook with a FB friend who recently found out she probably has face blindness, and she says she feels the same way.

    *I got a 78% on the test from the previous post, though I felt like there was a lot of guess work in the parts that used all 6 faces. I’ve taken another test before that used celebrities (it asked if you knew who the celebrities were to avoid counting unfamiliarity with celebrities as face blindness) and IIRC I was only a little below normal.

  22. 22
    KellyK says:

    I’ve scored below average on those tests before, and I have the same issue telling characters apart. If there are two dark-haired white guys, unless I already recognize one of the actors, I’m SOL.

  23. 23
    KellyK says:

    Also, I think Amp has seen this (it might be the one he posted on another thread), but it’s a good exploration of the gratuitous fat hate in the first episode. I think it was Amp on the other thread who pointed out that it’s not just characterizing Jessica as snarky and mean, but the way the show’s reality reinforces the stereotype.

    I came to a different conclusion than the author about the show as a whole being worth watching, but it struck me enough that I ended up writing fanfic about the unnamed burger and treadmill lady.

  24. 24
    Jeremy says:

    So fair to say, you find Clark Kent/Superman disguise very convincing?

  25. 25
    MJJ says:

    Nuno 13:

    I’ve noticed that in the Marvel Universe they often try to come up with a few token characteristics so that someone will be recognizable no matter who is drawing them (e.g. Reed Richard’s white stripe in his hair, the Osborn cornrows).

  26. 26
    Tamme says:

    @MJJ: I think that goes back to the ‘Silver Age’ when different artists would depict characters very differently, so even ocular-typical readers might have difficulty telling that they were looking at the same character without a handy ‘cheat’ of the sort you’ve described.

  27. 27
    Copyleft says:

    That’s what’s so great about superhero comics: brightly colored, highly distinctive costumes. Even if the artist draws every face identically (as has often been the case), you can look for the bat symbol or red-and-blue spider motif.

  28. 28
    nobody.really says:

    Yeah, I gave up on Once Upon A Time because I couldn’t tell any of the women apart so I had no idea what was going on at any time. It was a truly frustrating experience.

    Tell me about it. Did anyone see Minions? I was TOTALLY lost….

  29. 29
    Ruchama says:

    So fair to say, you find Clark Kent/Superman disguise very convincing?

    I switched from glasses to contacts over winter break my freshman year of college, and there was a guy in my dorm who didn’t recognize me.

  30. 30
    closetpuritan says:

    @KellyK: I liked that fanfic!

  31. 31
    Ampersand says:

    I liked it too!

  32. 32
    nobody.really says:

    I’ve always regarded myself as bad with names and faces, and just imagined that I had some kind of neurological face blindness. But I scored an 81, which is average for an adult.

    So on to Theory 2: I don’t look at people. It’s not that I’m shy; it’s that I don’t care. Of all the things in an environment, unfamiliar humans will be the last thing I choose to focus on. (Ok, if I’m feeling threatened — or aroused — then I’ll focus on strangers….) I’ll strike up a conversation with all the dogs and cats before I turn my attention to strangers.

    (Oh, I’m happy to talk to YOU guys — because you’re just a bunch of words and ideas to me. So I can chat, chat, chat. But if we were seat mates on a plane ride, I’d be asleep before they could instruct me on fastening my seatbelt. Even in the center aisle.)

    Anyway, Happy New Years, guys!

  33. 33
    Mandolin says:

    Nobody — It’s just a single test, of course. You might have just had a really good day for guessing.

    Random stray thought — you might want to look at the “reading the emotion in the eye” tests? You might be able to recognize faces, but if you’re not getting the same dense degree of information out of looking at them as many people do, it might make looking at them less interesting.

  34. 34
    Mandolin says:

    Reading the mind in the eye: http://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite/

    I scored slightly above average, normal for me on these types of tests.

  35. 35
    annqueue says:

    Fascinating, I got 30 out of 36 on this test. Average is 26. So though I have trouble recognizing faces, I’m better than average at recognizing emotions. At least according to this pair of tests. That matches my experience, actually, I seem to be average or better at picking up what’s going on socially, which is a really weird combination with not knowing who the hell I’m looking at. But I do use the emotion recognition ability to offset the prosopagnosia (I talk about a few things and watch *really really* closely to see the reaction and look for clues on whether I’m talking to who I think I’m talking to).

    Amp, I’d love to know how you’d score on the eye-emotions test.

  36. 36
    Jake Squid says:

    I got 25 out of 36 on the test. I felt like I was guessing at almost all of them. Do I lack confidence in my ability or did I just guess really well? What I felt by the end of the test was, “I have no idea how to read people’s eyes.”

  37. 37
    Mandolin says:

    It’s mostly about eyebrows and pupil dilation, I think…

  38. 38
    KellyK says:

    I liked it too!

    Aww, thanks! Sorry for the complete non-sequitur of posting it in this thread rather than the open thread or the Jessica Jones thread. Apparently this is what happens when you have multiple tabs open.