🔗 Share this article

During my twenties, I observed my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd had similar experiences all through my life. From time to time, I "knew" an individual I didn't know. At times I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my grandma. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I started wondering if other people have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees people in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have developed many evaluations to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, 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 extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a feeling that scientists say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I received several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a string of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate 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 extreme of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Potential Causes

It was suggested that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also likely 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 develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, 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 closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Researching further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

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

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding