🔗 Share this article

During my twenties, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations during my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the unknown individual reminded me of – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if different individuals have these odd experiences. When I questioned my friends, one commented she frequently sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described nothing of the kind – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have designed many evaluations to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to recognize 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 think I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use different brain functions; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that researchers say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I completed 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 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 familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after evaluation of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a string of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Causes

It was proposed that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus 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 unfamiliar individual who resembles my grandma. 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 tests helped me understand where I positioned 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 condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

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

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding