🔗 Share this article

During my mid-20s, I spotted my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt astonished – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a moment, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "knew" an individual I had never met. At times I could quickly identify who the stranger reminded me of – like my grandmother. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I began questioning if others have these peculiar situations. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

Investigators have designed many evaluations to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt curious whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that scientists say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, 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 quite place them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. 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 few of people with potential HFF in extended periods of study.

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

{Understanding