🔗 Share this article

Throughout my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I looked intently for a moment, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd had similar occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "identified" an individual I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly identify who the stranger reminded me of – such as my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I asked my companions, one said she often sees persons in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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 experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have designed many tests to assess the capacity to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for example, there is indication that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that experts say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. 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 exactly identify them – comparable to my everyday experience.

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

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests 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" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a physical event such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in long durations of research.

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

{Understanding