🔗 Share this article

Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my grandmother through the glass of a café. I felt astonished – she had passed away the previous year. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" a person I didn't know. Sometimes I could promptly determine who the unknown individual resembled – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I began questioning if others have these unusual situations. When I asked my friends, one commented she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look known. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some reported completely different responses – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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.

Grasping the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

Researchers have designed many assessments to assess the ability to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to identify relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for case, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Face Identification Evaluations

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that researchers 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 person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled 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 lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

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

Examining Excessive Recognition 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 "identify" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. 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 few of people with possible HFF in long durations of investigation.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding