🔗 Share this article

During my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the window of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the previous year. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd had similar occurrences all through my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my grandma. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I became curious if other people have these odd encounters. When I asked my friends, one commented she often sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Investigators have created many evaluations to quantify the ability to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for case, 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 remember old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree 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 memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. 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 quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after analysis of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding Incorrect Identification Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but rarely misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was suggested that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 inclined to notice the unknown person who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a medical episode such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of investigation.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding