🔗 Share this article

In my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I stared for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations during my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger reminded me of – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I became curious if other people have these odd situations. When I questioned my friends, one said she often sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Researchers have created many evaluations to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the ability to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain functions; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Tests

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after evaluation of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also surprised. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Plausible Reasons

It was theorized that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition 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" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

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

{Understanding