🔗 Share this article

During my mid-20s, I spotted my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had passed away the year before. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced comparable experiences throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" someone I didn't know. At times I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – for instance my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Exploring the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if others have these unusual encounters. When I questioned my friends, one commented she often sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others at times misidentify a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported no such experiences – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research 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 perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Face Identification Capacities

Researchers have created many evaluations to quantify the ability to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain processes; for case, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. 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 exactly identify them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Causes

It was theorized that I probably possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and commit faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. 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 unrecognized faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of documented instances all occurred after a medical episode such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been observing 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 face identification challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in many years of investigation.

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

{Understanding