🔗 Share this article

In my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced analogous experiences all through my life. From time to time, I "knew" someone I didn't know. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my grandma. Other times, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I became curious if other people have these unusual encounters. When I inquired my friends, one said she regularly sees persons in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others at times confuse a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies 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.

Comprehending the Range of Face Identification Capacities

Researchers have developed many evaluations to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would provide insight on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a sentiment that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, 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 familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after assessment of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a sequence of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics 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?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations 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. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in many years 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 all visages is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding