🔗 Share this article

Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had passed away the previous year. I looked intently for a short time, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd had similar experiences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I had never met. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Lately, I started wondering if others have these odd experiences. When I asked my acquaintances, one said she frequently sees individuals in random places who look familiar. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Face Identification Skills

Scientists have created many tests to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for instance, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that researchers say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after assessment of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all happened after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in long durations of research.

"The prevalence 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 known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding