Are you face blind? Test your own facial memory

Want to test your own ability to recognize faces? There's several online tests available through the Prosopagnosia Research Centers at Harvard and the UK's University College London. I got an 86%—better than average—on the Cambridge Memory Face Test. How about you?

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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g0d5m15t4k3

Cambridge Face Memory test:

Out of 72 faces, you correctly identified 65.
In other words, you got 90% correct.
Anonymous

99%

Ditto to 100% projected failure on name recognition…

Perhaps remembering faces well just ups the number of people you can’t put a name to (as opposed to simply remembering neither)…

Actually, I feel bad at name recognition because I often fail to remember names that my partner recalls, despite having the same previous interaction.
tessuraea

I rated myself average and then scored a 79%. The test told me “average” was 80%. Yay for self-perception!

I actually spot actors pretty well, but it’s not faces that do it – movements and voices play in as well. I have next to no visual memory (seriously – I don’t “picture” things, haven’t been able to since I was six), which means that I rely on a sense of familiarity to recognize people. If I think someone looks familiar, I almost certainly know that specific person, and not just someone who looks like them. It’s always seemed magical to me: if you ask me what someone looks like, most the time I can’t tell you, or at least can’t give you details. I can’t close my eyes and picture them. But I regularly recognize people on the street I haven’t seen in more than a decade. I’m always afraid I won’t recognize someone important that I haven’t seen in a while, because I can’t remember what they look like. It never happens.

For the test, I’m pretty sure I was fine for a while, but toward the end *all* of them started to look familiar, and since I rely on that sense of familiarity… ugh. Anyway, I don’t mind being average, but I found the test really interesting; I think I’m way below average on visual memory, but probably above on actual recognition of real people. I don’t know what all that means in terms of “face blindness” though.
g0d5m15t4k3

Famous faces:

Out of 30 faces, you correctly identified 28.
You were familiar with 28 of the people in this test.

If we exclude the ones you were unfamiliar with, you got 100% correct.

I guess I didn’t know Margaret Thatcher. And the other one I got wrong I already forget because I didn’t know who they were.
Kimmo

93%
Boondocker

96% on the faces, which fits in with the standard BBer, I guess. I thought I was special!

Is it telling that I saw all of the generic faces as male? (I think some of them had 5-o’clok shadow, though, so I might be in the clear.)

100% on the celebrities. Bit of a disappointing sample… three non-whites, and probably less than a quarter female? That test fails the diversity test.
g0d5m15t4k3

This all stuck me as interesting because recently I kept thinking that Nicholas Cage was in Flatliners. But I looked it up on IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099582/) and its Keifer Sutherland. But I don’t feel like they look that much alike. I know Keifer from After Alice and Dark City. Nicholas Cage makes me want to punch him in the face for his bad acting. Maybe its because Flatliners has Julia Roberts in it, another actor I want to punch in the face for bad acting.
felsby

scored myself as “average” but to my surprise got 92%
Anonymous

Apparently there are two related conditions. One is prosopagnosia, which is “face blindness,” and one is prosopamnesia, which is an inability or impaired ability to remember faces. It sounds like many of you, like myself, may have prosopamnesia.
Mobius

Is it just me, or do the majority of people have trouble with names (seems so here)? What does that mean?

I got 89% and am terrible with names. So bad that I don’t even try anymore. If I meet a person say 3x, then I’ll find out their name, as I may (cross fingers) be able to remember it. No guarantees though.
Anonymous

I only got 64%… I’ve always known that I was bad at recognising faces. It doesn’t seem to get in my way much though. For recognising people I will use context, hair, clothes and voice, they seem to serve me pretty well.

I’ve only had one amusing moment, when I was at school and a good friend of mine cut his hair. I thought he was a new guy and went to go and introduce myself… he spoke just before I did that, and I worked out who it was from that.
Anonymous

Woot! I got 93%! I’m glad they didn’t ask me to remember names — that would have been a disaster!
mdh

Without spoiling anything, halfway through that test I said oh, $%#^. Clever test, I scored lower than Maggie.
Bookburn

Trippy. 92%
pffft

99% (71/72)

I’ve always known I’m really good at faces.

However, I am HORRIBLE at names. I can recognize someone and not remember their name for YEARS.

Would be interesting if there was a “put a name to a face” test.
- Anonymous
  
  100%, but I’m the same as you. I’ll forget a name literally seconds after I’m told it!
Sekino

I scored 94%
Nicky G

97% on the Cambridge. I said “average” but when I think about it, I know that I’m good with faces. I typically won’t forget someone I’ve met, and often recognize complete strangers that I know I’ve run into before (not the context, however.)

I would say that I am usually below-average with names, but really only in social situations. If it’s business-related, names tend to stick. Getting stored in different parts of the brain, apparently.

Very interesting stuff.
Viadd

47% (34/72 where 24/72 is random chance) on Cambridge Memory Face Test. And 48% (14/29 familiar faces) on the famous faces test. I already knew I had a problem.
Anonymous

40% for me, and most of that was just random guessing. I’m not just faceblind… I have a visual recall block, so if I don’t make word stories about people and places, I cannot access them at all later. So I was hoping for hair or something I could name… the closest I could come was one guy had “big eyes”, so in every later picture, I’d pick the guy with the biggest eyes just in case.

Makes it hard to uses icon-based displays too, unless I can figure out a word for each of the icons quickly. I spend a *lot* of time waiting for tooltips to come up… PLEASE PEOPLE, USE WORDS IN YOUR UI!
Anonymous

90% with my eyes closed.
Anonymous

94% – a lot better than I thought I would do as I feel like I have trouble remembering people. But I think names trip me up a lot more than faces do.
Anonymous

I’m somewhat notorious among certain friends for certain incidents of facial recognition failure. Sometimes I’ve been unable to follow movie plots due to mixing up the two male leads. One time two of my friends saw me volunteering at an event, came over and waited for me to be free to chat, and gave up after about ten minutes during which I (so I’m told) had looked directly at them multiple times. I’d had no idea they were there.

So I was slightly disappointed when the test told me I’m well above average (92% compared to the average 80%). Oh well. I wonder if I was not supposed to be consciously labelling facial features in words and memorising those, rather than just remembering visual impressions. I expect I’m just clutching at straws now to retain my specialness…
- RadioGuy
  
  @Anonymous #8
  
  I’m in the same boat. I scored 89%, but that seems not to reflect my day-to-day experience. During the last half of the test, I was really making random guesses a lot — perhaps I just made lucky choices that inflated my score.
  
  I often lose track of who’s who while watching a movie featuring actors I’m unfamiliar with. All males of similar ethnicity, height and hair colour tend to be indistinguishable to me until well into the film….
  
  I notice it a lot in B-level action movies — often 3 or 4 of the main characters are guys around 5′ 8″ with brown hair in a brush cut. Suddenly there’s a scene where some dude is breaking into a bank vault or whatever, and I can’t tell if it’s the hero, the villian, or the comedic sidekick!
  
  I seem to have less of a problem recognising women’s faces. It’s possible that distinctive makeup helps improve my recognition, or (more likely) I’m just paying more attention!
hbl

97% (70/72) – can’t think where I went wrong!? Fun test.
stabby13

97% (70/72)
Jerril

I’m not face blind but I’m probably “face nearsighted”, and the way I scored certainly suggests that impression isn’t off the mark.

69% here on the Cambridge one, done before my work day. I’m inclined to retest myself after I’m tired from work (not working with people, programming). I was diagnosed high functioning autistic in the 80s, and I’ve had quite a bit of both formal therapy and personal therapy since to develop coping mechanisms. When I’m tired, I can’t do my tricks…
Anonymous

110% – exceeded even my own expectations!
Joe The Wizard

“Out of 72 faces, you correctly identified 71.
In other words, you got 99% correct.”

Boom. Click.
Antinous / Moderator

Great. After ten minutes on the test, their server’s down.
Anonymous

Hmm… 72%
bob d

Huh, I know I’m terrible with names, but I was also convinced I was somewhat face-blind before taking the test, but apparently not, as I scored 97%. How is that I routinely confuse characters with similar haircuts on tv shows and movies, then?
Ernunnos

94%. I see similarities to actors all the time, even when they’re pretty tenuous. Once you see “Dave Foley”, “John Lurie”, “That guy from Generation Kill”, “Richard Edson”, etc. it gets pretty easy to recognize them again. I think what screwed me up is that I started assigning names to some of the control faces, and forgot they weren’t in the main group.
- Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  Hah! I started doing the same thing about halfway through. I swear to god, one of those faces looks exactly like Billy Corgan.
  
  And chalk me up as one of the relatively high-scoring facial recognition people who would be screwed in name memory was added to this test.
Antinous / Moderator

Ah, back up again. 96%. Strongly recommend removing your reading glasses for the colored fuzzy portion of the test.
thehamsterman

96% here. the last section was really tricky. i recognize people in public all the time, i just never talk to them because i’m not sure they recognize me.
zorkerz

I got 86% also. It was really hard. At first I tried to study the options really closely before choosing one but in the end I think I did better by quickly following my gut instinct.
Anonymous

“Out of 72 faces, you correctly identified 72.
…In other words, you got 100% correct.”
I win the pretend faces game!
4649

97%… curses! the last segment was not as tricky as it seemed at the time.
Ipo

I’m great with remembering faces. At one time, bartending, I knew to match hundreds (thousands?) of faces with their drinks. Names not so much. Numbers? Not a bit.

“Find as you type” tells me there is no 1.
torgeaux

71/72, and I’m not sure how I missed one. This was an amazingly easy test. I wish they’d add a time element, as for me at least it was a matter of hitting the number the second the faces came up.

This explains why I annoy people with “hey, isn’t that the guy who had a bit part in that movie 22 years ago?”
Anonymous

Wow. 100%… I guess working with literally thousands of different people has it’s perks.

I’ve always considered myself as a totally face-blind person. But maybe it’s just connecting the right face with the right person that’s the problem.
Anonymous

hey i was part of the group who made the test. there is a fail question in there to test people’s confusion if they see no right face. so there is no way to get 100 or 99 percent ;)

but thanks for doing our test.
- g0d5m15t4k3
  
  Yeah I got a couple of those feelings taking the test. Like in my mind I was saying “Uh, NONE of these look like the control faces.” It explains everything.
Anonymous

Where’s the “Above the median” option?
Anonymous

I got 60%.

I guess this explains why I can never remember who my waiter is in a restaurant!
Ipo

Fun! 92%.
Kaleberg

I got 61% right! That was better than I expected. It took me a while to realize that they were showing three views of the same first during the first part of the test. Also, what does one look at during the 20 seconds of “training” that might help one get a better score. I looked for five or ten seconds, then went browsing something else. Does looking at faces longer make them more identifiable for most people?

On the other hand, I can read mirror writing upside almost as fast as regular writing right side up. Who knew I was destroying my face recognition ability when I learned how to do this as a child? There was an interesting paper in Science recently on how reading uses repurposed face recognition neurons in the brain.
penguinchris

Well, just for some balance, I’ll report my below-average score (and not anonymously). I got 55 correct for 76%.

And of *course* I said at the beginning that I thought I was above average :)

The first part I totally breezed through, for sure. The second part I think I did pretty well, but there were definitely some tricky ones I may have gotten wrong. The fuzzy part I’m not sure about. I wish you could review your results to see where you went wrong, though, as I really have no idea!

Now the interesting thing… unlike all these people with 90%+ scores who claim to have trouble with faces on TV and in movies (or in real life), I definitely do not have trouble with faces. Names, yes – I think I would probably score <25% on a similar test for names (and that’s being generous).

Actually, I sometimes have trouble in war movies if everyone stays in full uniform and the main characters are typical white actors without obvious genetic traits (e.g. not the more diverse cast of Saving Private Ryan – being all-white doesn’t mean not diverse as they showed quite well there) – but it’s obvious they know that’s a problem, so the main characters almost always have ways to identify them – perhaps they lose their helmet right away, or there’s some sort of identifying mark on their weapon or uniform.
Gemma

I think I’m below average for face recognition, and find it particularly hard to link names to faces.

I scored 67% on the face recognition, with quite a lot of complete guesses in the latter stages of the test. (I could have sworn that sometimes they showed three faces I’d never seen before, and on other rounds they showed two familiar faces at once!)

Amusingly, I scored 100% on the celebrity faces quiz. I think I would have missed one or maybe two of the harder ones if I had not read their names in the comments already (i.e. Tony Blair and Patrick Stewart. Tony Blair looked a lot like one of the Osmonds, I thought. I also marked myself correct for Condoleezza Rice although I completely forgot her first name.) A couple times I had to sit for a minute to recall their name as I worked my way through films I’d seen them in. Quite often seeing their faces made me think of jokes I’d seen about them on The Daily Show, which presumably cemented them in my memory.

I wish I were better at remembering both names and faces in real life. It can take a large number of interactions with the same customer at work before they look familiar to me, and it will take longer still before I can see them and remember their name. Sometimes I find that I get that feeling of recognition when I see a customer’s signature, before I get to the point of finding their face even vaguely familiar!
dofnup

Wanting to be modest, I chose “somewhat above average” as my initial self-assesment, but I REALLY wanted to choose “far above average”.

I got 100%.

I knew it! … just like I knew that if this had been a name-memory test, I would have scored something like 0.9% >_<

I shall join the “Never Forget a Face; Never Remember a Name” club!
SBW

“Out of 72 faces, you correctly identified 44.
In other words, you got 61% correct.”

I am surprised I got that many right. I was just guessing for most of them, picking the one which seemed vaguely familiar.

On their famous people test, I got 3 correct. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize Patrick Stewart! I want to say that the lack of hair made it difficult, but in his case…

When I watch movies with actors that look even vaguely similar, I’m always asking my wife “which character is that?”
Caretta

So many people have already said what I’m about to; my 93% wasn’t especially surprising, but I’d have no chance with names.

I’m continually recognising actors in film and TV, but frequently find that I just can’t place where I’ve seen them before. It’s quite infuriating.
Hmpf

Got a surprising 74% on the Cambridge test (I’ve been known to not recognise neighbours of thirty years, in unfamiliar contexts). I don’t trust that result, though – not just because it doesn’t fit my own everyday experience, but rather because I *know* that once the part with sets of six faces had started, I was mostly guessing. And not in a “oh, number three looks *vaguely* familiar, so let’s choose that” kind of way, but rather in a completely random way. Obviously, I must have hit the right button a few times – but that was *not* because I recognised the face in question!

Got a much more expected 54% on the famous faces test. Knew 28 of the 30 celebrities, but only recognised 15. Oddly enough I recognised most of the comedians – even the ones I’ve barely seen in anything.
chgoliz

I assumed I would be below average, but instead scored a respectable 82%.

What I’m finding interesting is that posters here found the second half to be more difficult. I thought there would be some explanation at the end for why it was so much easier to recognize the “real” faces that way, because that’s how it felt to me. I’d love to know why I found that style so much easier to read, since it seems to be outside the norm.
equilibrist

89%

Much better than when I’m walking down the street.

Sorry, I didn’t recognize you.
Anonymous

44 correct — 61%

Not a surprise here — I’ve always struggled to learn people’s faces.
Catherine Omega

I got 51%, which is actually quite a bit better than I had expected. I usually recognize people by their teeth and build more than anything else. Facial features? Not a chance.
- Boondocker
  
  That’s really interesting, CO. Would you say you have prosopagnosia, or has anyone else told you that? Have you always had face-blindness?
colinadams

100%, but i am an illustrator for a living, and though I forget names all the time, I never forget a face. I actually look at faces all the time, and painting or drawing exact likenesses is the most difficult part. This test shows that just a slight variation in a mouth or nose or jawline makes it a different person.

–Colin
Anonymous

92% Not surprising to me, I’ve always been good with faces despite my pretty terrible vision. It’s names that I’m hopeless with.
Anonymous

Out of 72 faces, you correctly identified 65.
In other words, you got 90% correct.

I answered wrongly one (pressed the wrong key, that’s another story). I normally associate a face to someone I know, by any vague resemblance (like the Billy Corgan reference above, I named one of the faces ‘Matt Damon’). Also this time I looked for particular signs in the faces (bold eyebrows, small eyes, round cheeks, etc). one of the faces had no signs that stroke me as particular (‘nothing face’), so that one was kind of difficult to select as correct.
colin

99%… but I thought I was terrible at this kind of thing. My wife makes fun of me for not recognizing actors on TV. She and her sister can spot the reappearance of someone who’s been in a bit role or commercial months (or years) before. Maybe because it was framed as “you’re being tested” I was paying much closer attention than I usually do.
Maneki Nico

100% on unfamiliar faces, 97% (29/30) on familiar ones. Thinking I should consider a career as a professional eyewitnessâ€¦

[SPOILER ALERT]

Like others here, Tony Blair tripped me up (damn you, Tony Blair!) on the famous faces test. I suspect a lot of people may be missing this one because that’s a very un-Tony-Blair-like photo?
lux_aurumque

94% — unfamiliar faces
97% — familiar faces (missed Blair! Crazy!)

I found giving the faces back-stories helped me to remember them.
- retrac13
  
  I missed Blair too!
  
  It must be a weird picture of him, because I actually thought to myself, “Is that Tony Blair? Nooo… his face is more pinched!”
Anonymous

I rated myself below average because I can seldom pick one celebrity, media presenter or beauty pageant entrant from any of the others. A few stand out, but the rest are clones, maybe with different coloured hair but they change that so it doesn’t really help. I’m also “on the spectrum” and really couldn’t identify people by their faces when I was a child, except for my parents and sister.

So I scored 92%. But this test can only be short-term memory. I think it is long-term memory that counts.
Anonymous

100%. Both times the Billy Corgan amalgamation came up I had to pause and be sure that one was not the correct answer. Sneaky.