🔗 Share this article

During my young adulthood, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "knew" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the unknown individual resembled – like my grandma. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I became curious if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my companions, one said she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have created many tests to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain functions; for case, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained 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 multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after analysis of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also surprised. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but seldom misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Plausible Causes

It was theorized that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 unknown person who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of documented instances all took place after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in extended periods of research.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding