🔗 Share this article

During my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had comparable situations all through my life. From time to time, I "knew" an individual I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – such as my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Range of Person Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I questioned my acquaintances, one commented she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative 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 have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have created many tests to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the skill to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending False Alarm Frequencies

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, 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 tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

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

{Understanding