Today a particular phenomenon caught my attention, which I observed in myself for my entire life, but always forgot to mention in this forum. I have a weird tendency to confuse people's faces, if the colors/shapes of their face/body look relatively similar.
There is a grocery store near my house, and I visit it almost daily. (sometimes 3-4 days per week)
Most of the people working in that store have been working there for at least 4 years now.
There's maybe at least 10 different workers there, some of them are a cashiers.
There's 2 older blonde ladies with short hair, and there's 2 younger blonde girls with long hair. All 4 of these are cashiers, so I encounter them face-to-face regularly.
Even though their faces look completely different when compared side by side, I nevertheless keep confusing/mixing the two young girls with each other, and the two older women with each other. And that mix-up keeps happening almost every day, and it happens simply because they have similar general attributes (youth, long hair, blonde hair, for the two girls) and (old age, short hair, blonde hair, for the older ladies).
For whatever reason, those 4 people are more like only 2 people for me.
Why does this happen, and what functions are responsible for this?
It seems as though my brain prefers to record just "generalizations" of a person's appearance (hair length, body width, colors), rather than remember the actual small details of a person's face or clothes. And in order to actually remember the details, I'd have to come in a close relationship with that person.
I had this same problem in university. When I had to meet and get along with a lot of new people, I often confused some of them due to them possessing remotely similar general features.
There is a grocery store near my house, and I visit it almost daily. (sometimes 3-4 days per week)
Most of the people working in that store have been working there for at least 4 years now.
There's maybe at least 10 different workers there, some of them are a cashiers.
There's 2 older blonde ladies with short hair, and there's 2 younger blonde girls with long hair. All 4 of these are cashiers, so I encounter them face-to-face regularly.
Even though their faces look completely different when compared side by side, I nevertheless keep confusing/mixing the two young girls with each other, and the two older women with each other. And that mix-up keeps happening almost every day, and it happens simply because they have similar general attributes (youth, long hair, blonde hair, for the two girls) and (old age, short hair, blonde hair, for the older ladies).
For whatever reason, those 4 people are more like only 2 people for me.
Why does this happen, and what functions are responsible for this?
It seems as though my brain prefers to record just "generalizations" of a person's appearance (hair length, body width, colors), rather than remember the actual small details of a person's face or clothes. And in order to actually remember the details, I'd have to come in a close relationship with that person.
I had this same problem in university. When I had to meet and get along with a lot of new people, I often confused some of them due to them possessing remotely similar general features.
