🔗 Share this article

Throughout my young adulthood, I observed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had passed away the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations all through my life. From time to time, I "identified" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could promptly identify who the stranger looked like – for instance my grandmother. On other occasions, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Capabilities

In recent times, I became curious if different individuals have these unusual situations. When I inquired my companions, one mentioned she often sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? 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.

Understanding the Continuum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Investigators have developed many tests to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to know kin, intimate companions 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 suspect I am deficient. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the skill to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for case, there is indication that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that scientists say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I received several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

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

Understanding Incorrect Identification Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential 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 continuum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding