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Comment by Tor3 | Hacker News Reader

I also have problems with faces, if they've changed slightly or I see them in unfamiliar places. I don't have aphantasia, or problems recalling my past - quite the opposite, I have strong visual memories from before I was three.

On the other hand I'm extremely good at recognizing people from their gait. I can see someone in the far distance and know who they are, even if we haven't met in years. For some reason I also recognize people from how they place their shoes.. as when I walked in somewhere and saw a pair of shoes and immediately knew that it was one of my cousins I hadn't seen in ten years.

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I have a similar thing about the gait and I think it might have to do with me needing glasses, but it being mild enough (-1.0, -2.0) that I didn't wear them as a teenager and in my early twenties - so my NN just trained on the data it had ready access too: Gait, preferred colors, movement patterns etc.

The not recognizing people in unexpected locations is something I just mark down to "page fault" and move on. Nobody expects total recall anyway.

Exactly, I have severe myopia, that was quickly developing during my teenage years so my glasses were often too weak. Beacuse of that my brain learned to identify people by gait too.

I didn't consider it might be myopia; I was diagnosed around 10, but already -3.5

I didn't consider that - my eyesight wasn't checked before I was nearly five years old, then my father started suspecting something (I still remember him asking if I could see a crow a couple of hundred meters away, between two slanted poles. I couldn't separate the slanted poles). So, I got glasses, for astigmatism and hyperopia, and I could see. Finally. If that's related to how I so easily recognize gaits (better than faces) I will never know. (It's not that I don't recognize faces, it's just that I may have problems if they're in places I don't expect or if they change a bit - getting older, or a haircut etc).

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