TIL that this has a name and apparently isn’t very well understood?
In general, I don’t know what people or things look like when they’re not here. Familiarity without attention doesn’t help me recall it. Probably because I had severely bad eyesight that wasn’t corrected until age 7. Now with strong corrective lenses I can see things just fine when they’re right in front of me, and I might be able to recall what something/someone looked like later IF the picture is either very simple (e.g. a plain circle) or (rarely) IF while it/they were present, I was extra motivated to pay extra attention to that visual input for a very long time (my daughter’s new haircut). But remembering what a person was wearing, what color is my rental car, the cover of the book I’m reading right now, not going to happen. Navigating with a map on my phone is torture because whatever is outside the small window of the screen, even if I JUST saw it a second ago, poof it’s gone now.
From purely an amateur non-neuropsychologist standpoint it seems related to what people tend to call “tone deafness”, except for visual input. Neglect / underuse of certain neural pathways during the developmental window makes them stunted.
