🔗 Share this article

Throughout my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the prior year. I gazed for a short time, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations during my life. From time to time, I "knew" a person I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly determine who the unknown individual reminded me of – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these odd situations. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation 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 perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have designed many evaluations to quantify the capacity to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to recognize kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the skill to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use different brain functions; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale 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 familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending False Alarm Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but rarely misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Potential Reasons

It was theorized that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus 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 stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat 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 hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding