🔗 Share this article

In my twenties, I noticed my grandmother through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations during my life. Periodically, I "knew" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the stranger looked like – like my grandmother. Other times, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I began questioning if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she regularly sees people in random places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in real 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 spectrum of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother 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 starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Researchers have developed many tests to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at recognizing 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 examined the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these assessments would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, 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 precisely recognize them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a string of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but rarely confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, 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?

Exploring Plausible Reasons

It was proposed that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and retain faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial 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" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. 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 experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

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

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding