🔗 Share this article

In my mid-20s, I spotted my grandma through the window of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the year before. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced similar situations all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the stranger reminded me of – for instance my grandma. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these unusual situations. When I questioned my friends, one said she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Face Identification Capacities

Scientists have created many assessments to assess the ability to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for instance, there is indication that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was proposed that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the later element helps people to learn and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

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 sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in long durations of research.

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

{Understanding