🔗 Share this article

In my young adulthood, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt astonished – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced similar situations during my life. From time to time, I "recognized" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Lately, I started wondering if others have these unusual experiences. When I questioned my acquaintances, one said she often sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

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

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Researchers have created many tests to quantify the ability to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain processes; for example, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these tests would provide insight on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I waded through 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 directed me to pick out celebrities 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 assessment of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also surprised. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, 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 elderly relative's?

Exploring Plausible Causes

It was proposed that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus 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 similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding