🔗 Share this article

In my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had passed away the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered analogous experiences throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. Sometimes I could promptly determine who the stranger reminded me of – for instance my grandma. Other times, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these odd experiences. When I questioned my friends, one said she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others occasionally misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have designed many tests to measure the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to recognize relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the ability to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain functions; for example, there is evidence that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and store faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding