🔗 Share this article

During my young adulthood, I spotted my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the previous year. I looked intently for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced similar occurrences during my life. Periodically, I "recognized" someone I didn't know. At times I could rapidly determine who the unknown individual looked like – for instance my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Variety of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she regularly sees individuals in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some reported no such experiences – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research 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

Investigators have designed many evaluations to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But scientists "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 distinct brain mechanisms; 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 extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Face Identification Evaluations

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, 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 recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after analysis of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending False Alarm Rates

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and retain faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. 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 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 "recognize" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. 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 potential HFF in long durations of study.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding