🔗 Share this article

In my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had passed away the prior year. I gazed for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences all through my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the unknown individual resembled – like my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I began questioning if different individuals have these unusual experiences. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she often sees individuals in unexpected places who look familiar. Others occasionally misidentify a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have designed many tests to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain processes; for instance, there is indication that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, 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 public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after analysis of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize 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 grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

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

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in long durations of investigation.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding