🔗 Share this article

In my mid-20s, I noticed my grandmother through the pane of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a brief period, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly identify who the unknown individual looked like – such as my grandmother. Other times, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I started wondering if others have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others at times confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described completely different responses – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have created many assessments to assess the ability to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is proof that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a feeling that researchers say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after assessment of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Plausible Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in long durations of investigation.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding