🔗 Share this article

During my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the pane of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had departed the previous year. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar situations all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could rapidly pinpoint who the unknown individual looked like – for instance my elderly relative. Other times, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Lately, I began questioning if different individuals have these unusual experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she often sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others at times confuse a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? 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.

Understanding the Range of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have developed many assessments to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to identify relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a feeling 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 obtained several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also surprised. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Researching further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all happened after a health incident such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in extended periods 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 all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding