🔗 Share this article

During my mid-20s, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the previous year. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced comparable experiences during my life. Periodically, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. At times I could promptly determine who the unknown individual reminded me of – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

In recent times, I started wondering if others have these odd situations. When I asked my friends, one said she often sees people in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Face Identification Skills

Researchers have designed many tests to quantify the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recognize 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 know kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain processes; for example, there is indication that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a feeling that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, 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 recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Examining Plausible Reasons

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and retain faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, 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 identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity 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 "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all took place after a physical event such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in extended periods of research.

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

{Understanding