Poll Visual Recognition And Memory

[jaccat]

I'm not great with faces. Often I know I've seen a person before, but I have no clue where from. I have a brilliant memory for numbers, details etc. bordering on photographic, but faces just don't seem to register. Like the other week I spotted someone I work with whilst out. I didn't recognise her by her face because she was out of uniform. I recognised her feet!

 

[RockChick]

I'm great with faces but getting worse and worse with time. It seems to be all one long day, like I usually can't tell someone when something happened even if it was not long ago.

 

[halflifeguy]

Hah, yeah I'm not great with faces, and then worse with women's than men's for some reason. With bad face recog, I do rely on personal styles, body type, location/context to recognize people.

I can know someone for years and not recall their face. Often, I'm talking with someone I know casually only to realize it's not them, but another person that looks alike.

I don't think it's getting worse or better as time passes.

 

[The Albatross]

I ticked off the first three.... as a matter of course. Faces are the most concerning for me... yet have had instances where I've witnessed things and had difficulty with remembering what I see and sometimes I wind up in places where I don't remember still where I am though live in a small enough place where it's not hard to find my way out. I just take it as a matter of course now... will it get better? Dunno. It is what it is, for now.

 

[ms spock]

Have you looked at Prosopagnosia @Simply Simon?

 

[Fadeaway]

I hit other because i have trouble remembering conversations. I can tell you how I felt during the conversation, but often not what was said. My memory of how I felt during the conversation seems a bit exaggerated. My visual memory is pretty good sometimes, other times it isn't. Sometimes i can recall every detail of a time and place, other times, it is a blur. I can't seem to find any rhyme reason or emotional connection behind it.

 

[Kintsugi]

Yes, @Ms Spock, I'm pretty sure I suffer from some level of prosopagnosia and have thought so for a couple years. The BBC World News did a short segment on the disorder a few weeks back, and I was quite excited to hear about the condition talked about as a wider spectrum than those who cannot recognize anyone ever, including themselves.

 

[ms spock]

@Simply Simon - so glad you know about it.

 

[Weemie]

Indeed! PTSD and memory malfunctions pretty strongly correlate!

Neurologically speaking, iconic memory (visual memory) tends to lag somewhat behind auditory (sound) memory, but it is usually more effective than verbal (constructed) memory.

That is, due to the fact that we continuously take in visual information in front of us, it's not necessary for us to remember a "visual reverb." So, iconic memory lasts significantly shorter than auditory memory. But, for most people, iconic memory does transfer over into a mental image. This being separate from a cognitive map, which is a sort of, spatial organization of your memories. Even physically blind people have cognitive maps, actually!

There is some interesting research going on now w/ something called boundary/grid neurons that might be of relative interest. Boundary/grid neurons activate when we move our heads, to adjust for the trajectory and angle of our visual experiences, to be able to organize them into a spatial cognitive framework.

It's very possible that you could be onto something. We do experience disruptions in our memory formation as a result of PTSD, and when we dissociate I bet that it's higher. However, from what I've experienced, most people do have an iconic memory process that is separate from a verbal construction. That is, most people tend to generate a "picture" where they can "see" something that is almost similar to physically seeing the object. In fact, the areas of our brain associated with sight typically activate when retrieving an iconic memory.

There are a lot of different processes involved w/ visual recognition & memory. I have quite a few impairments myself, briefly:

I struggle with identifying objects (noticing if people are "in the crosswalk" when I'm driving [part of the reason I stopped driving]), discriminating objects (where is my cup, where are my keys, where is my book, where are my shoes, let's look around... visual white noise), and recognizing unique objects (people's cars, desks, handwriting, clothes, and yep: faces). I have prosopagnosia, finger agnosia, lateral masking issues (try "counting the bars on a barcode" to simulate this- this is what it's like for me to count objects), inability to copy complex shapes (and even simple ones, like a rotated cube), solve puzzles, left/right confusion, direction/topographical interpretation, speed & distance, etc.

These are all problems with visual recognition and perception, though as you can tell, prosopagnosia is only one minor part of it. So, for me, I don't think it's related to PTSD. At least, not directly.