🔗 Share this article

During my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd had similar occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "knew" someone I didn't know. At times I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – such as my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I became curious if others have these odd situations. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Scientists have created many evaluations to measure the ability to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain functions; for case, there is indication that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Face Identification Evaluations

I felt interested whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is frequent 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 waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after assessment of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and retain faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention 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 unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of reported cases all took place after a medical episode such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, 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 liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected 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 each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding