🔗 Share this article

During my twenties, I observed my grandmother through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the previous year. I gazed for a brief period, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences during my life. Periodically, I "knew" a person I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly pinpoint who the stranger resembled – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I became curious if others have these peculiar situations. When I asked my friends, one commented she regularly sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have created many assessments to assess the ability to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for case, there is indication that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these tests would offer understanding on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a sentiment that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that directed 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 – similar to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory 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 initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also astonished. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia 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 Potential Causes

It was suggested that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in extended periods of investigation.

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

{Understanding