🔗 Share this article

Throughout my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had departed the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Face Identification Capabilities

In recent times, I became curious if other people have these unusual encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one mentioned she often sees persons in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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.

Grasping the Range of Facial Recognition Capacities

Researchers have designed many assessments to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, 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 family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the ability to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain mechanisms; for example, there is proof 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 recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that told 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 – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate 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 end of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Possible Reasons

It was proposed that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", 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 attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching 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 "know" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in extended periods of research.

"The frequency 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 several occasions a month.

{Understanding