Hey, so I asked earlier about face blindness with my story about Patrick Stewart/Ian McKellen. I was wondering if you could explain "memory cue issue" a little more, since I don't know anything about it, but it sounds like that may be more the problem?
Usually when we identify things in the world, we are taking cues from the environment to jump start our memory.
Sometimes you need additional cues to pull a memory out of wherever it hides when you aren’t using it.
For example, if I hear a voice on TV I might recognize an actor’s voice but not his face. My wife will say something like, “He was in that one show that you like with the time traveling katana Spock,” I am getting several cues: Show I like, Show she doesn’t, Katana Spock - Oh, the character Hiro from Heroes!
And as soon as I get those cues I know not only who he is, but all the shows I”ve seen that he was in, including some I haven’t seen, my favorite lines of his from Heroes, and I sudden urge to load up Hulu and watch the show again.With autistics and ADHD, we store things in our brains and make connections that doesn’t necessarily make sense. So, for example, you might see pictures of Ian and Patrick together all the time, so you code them together and have a hard time recognizing them when they are apart. Or you might code them as “that old dude from the show I like that does feminism stuff” which could also be either of them. When you first see them - you get a visual memory cue of their face - you might transpose them because the way you stored the info is inaccurate.
Of course, there are many, many reasons why you might have issues with recall, but with autism and ADHD it is usually because we don’t always store things with the right flags to cue them again.
Basically, we can recognize some types of patterns really easily, other we just suck at. Faces and names and pronouns are some of the ones we tend to suck at.