🔗 Share this article

Throughout my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the unknown individual looked like – like my grandmother. In other instances, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Variety of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I became curious if others have these unusual situations. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she often sees people in unpredictable places who look known. Others occasionally mistake a stranger or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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.

Comprehending the Range of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have created many evaluations to assess the skill to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to recognize kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain functions; for instance, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my actual experience.

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

Understanding Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and identify 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 extreme of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, 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 unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Causes

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating 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 "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

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

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in extended periods of investigation.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding