I’ve always had some difficulty with identifying pictures. I am pretty sure it’s genetic, as I’m the daughter of a woman who didn’t understand what the red hand on crosswalk signs referred to (hint: it’s in contrast to the green or white walking person). (Hi mom!)
This caused me some trouble in first-grade phonics, with those mimeographed worksheets that showed a picture and then some letters, and you had to circle the one that the name of the object started or ended with. Sometimes I couldn’t figure out the picture at all, and sometimes there were difficulties with names. One that I remember very clearly showed a picture like this:
(image from this mildly amusing site)
I circled C for Cup. It wasn’t until I got the worksheet back with a big red X that I learned most people would call that a Mug.
This disability occasionally causes trouble in med school, since photos of medical conditions are usually cropped to include only the affected portion of the body, and often oriented strangely. I spend a lot of time in lectures like this morning’s (on anaerobic bacteria) whispering to my neighbor, “what IS that?”