[Grambo]

Actually I think there's a reason for this. I took a cognitive science class once where our professor said that many believe that the portion of the brain responsible for recognizing faces is separate from the portion that does all other visual recognition. Perhaps that's why people have a hard time remembering what a face looks like. It's also why some people can lose their ability to recognize faces but can still recognize all other objects.

[vanderZwan]

Could that also be why untrained artists are better at drawing faces if they view and draw them upside down?

[amagumori]

In "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" the upside down drawing exercise is suggested and i think the reasoning is that people draw facial features as "symbols", resorting to their own idea of what a nose looks like / how to draw a nose rather than drawing what they see. Drawing upside down stops this. Maybe this is related.

[marchenko]

there's a strange phenomenon that occurs in some pregnancies where extra bloodflow/pressure on a particular region of the brain causes women to over-identify faces (in electrical sockets, in crumpled laundry, etc.). other visual skills are unaffected.

[fapjacks]

Interesting. Do you have a link to more information?

[thelamest]

I don't know about pregnancies, but pareidolia and apophenia are terms in psychology for false positive pattern recognition.