🔗 Share this article

In my young adulthood, I spotted my grandma through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had died the year before. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced comparable occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "knew" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the stranger resembled – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Range of Face Identification Capabilities

Recently, I started wondering if other people have these unusual experiences. When I asked my friends, one commented she regularly sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many evaluations to assess the skill to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to recognize kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the skill to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Assessments

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

I received several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after analysis of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in many years of study.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding